Montserrat Caballé

Fire, earth and water take three of her ten planets each and air a single one, with four of the ten cardinal and four mutable. The Sun, Venus and Uranus sit inside three and a half degrees of Aries, a very tight group. The record calls Caballe one of the great bel canto sopranos, with a pianissimo that could carry to the back of a hall, and names her as the other voice on Barcelona with Freddie Mercury.

Three planets inside three and a half degrees put identity, taste and the unexpected in one place, and in that order it is a usable description: a self that cannot easily be separated from what it finds beautiful, with something unpredictable sitting on top of both. Venus at nineteen degrees and the Sun at twenty two are the pair that matters most here, and the Sun sits in mild friction with that Venus at fourteen hundredths of a degree, which is the hardest angle those two can ever make, since Venus never gets far enough from the Sun to square it. The reading is a mild version of the fusion, with taste and self-worth slightly out of step rather than genuinely at odds. For a soprano the record describes by one quiet note that carried to the back of a hall, that fusion of self and taste is the reading with the most singing in it.

The Moon sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at just under a degree, which is empathy that costs nothing: kindness, imagination, and an ease with art or music. In an opera singer that is the fit a reader expects, and it is worth saying plainly that it is also the easiest fit in this chart to make, because Neptune contacts get read as musical in anybody who turned out to be musical. The Moon's sign is certain at nineteen degrees of Scorpio, where everything matters too much for anything to be casual. The Sun stands in hard contact with Pluto at under nine tenths of a degree, identity in a power struggle: confrontation with authority, and periods where a person feels they must be entirely remade.

Jupiter sits at an awkward angle to Saturn at a third of a degree, the closest contact here, expansion against caution: the swing between taking too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. Jupiter and Neptune were the two retrograde planets. She died at Barcelona on 6 October 2018, at eighty five, in the city of her birth and of the song. Neptune stood in direct opposition to her natal Jupiter at thirteen hundredths of a degree that day, Pluto sixty degrees from her natal Moon at fourteen, and Uranus in easy contact with her natal Mars at four tenths. The Moon was balsamic and ten per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.