Leonard Bernstein

The Moon sits on the twentieth degree of Aries and Saturn on the twentieth of Leo, the same degree and the same arcminute, which makes a contact between them at one hundredth of a degree, and the Moon's sign is certain. Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, earth two and a single one air, with five of the ten fixed. The record says Bernstein wrote West Side Story, conducted the New York Philharmonic, taught a generation what classical music was through television, and conducted Beethoven's Ninth at the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Venus sits conjunct Neptune at seven tenths of a degree, and the reading is idealised affection: artistic sensibility, tenderness, and a persistent tendency to see people as they might be rather than as they are. The third of those is the one the record tests. Teaching a general television audience what classical music was, rather than what it was assumed they could take, is treating people as they might be instead of as they are, and the record counts a generation of them.

The exact pairing is quieter. The Moon in easy contact with Saturn at a hundredth of a degree reads as emotional steadiness: people who are reliable in a crisis and who do not require much reassurance, and in a conductor being reliable in front of an orchestra is the job rather than a virtue. A single planet in air, in a man whose largest achievement was explaining things, is the count that cuts against all of it, and air in a chart is a temperament rather than an aptitude.

Mars sits in easy contact with Pluto at under a degree, power under command: strategic effort, and strength that does not need to be demonstrated. The Sun sits on the first degree and a half of Virgo, a planet on a threshold, and Mercury and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died in New York on 14 October 1990, at seventy two. Uranus stood in direct opposition to his natal Pluto at a third of a degree that day, which is a slow pair and carries little. The Moon was at its last quarter and fifteen per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.