Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Fire takes five of the ten planets, earth and water two each and a single one air, with five of the ten fixed. Mercury, Venus and Pluto fill under seven degrees of Aries, a tight group in the sign that goes first. The record says Tchaikovsky wrote the three ballets everybody knows and six symphonies that are harder work than their reputation, and died nine days after conducting the premiere of the sixth.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Saturn at nine hundredths of a degree, close enough to call exact. The reading is structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration. Six symphonies is what that contact looks like when somebody has a working life to spend on it, and no other contact in this chart comes close to the record in the same way. The Sun sits conjunct Mars at two thirds of a degree, which puts the self and the will in one place: courage, competitiveness, and a low tolerance for being told to wait.

Two T-squares close here and both share Jupiter and Neptune, one adding Mars and the other the Sun, so the composer's own two tightest personal planets are each locked into a figure with no outlet. Saturn sits square Uranus at just over a degree and a fifth, order against revolt. The Moon sits on the first degree of Leo at noon and may have been in Cancer, so it is left out. Jupiter and Saturn were the two retrograde planets.

Tchaikovsky died at Saint Petersburg on 6 November 1893, at fifty three. Saturn stood directly opposite the natal Pluto at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky, with the transiting Sun conjunct the natal Jupiter at just over two thirds and square the natal Neptune at three fifths, which is both points of one of those T-squares at once. The Moon was balsamic and four per cent lit, the phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.