Sergei Prokofiev

Not one of his ten planets sits in a fire sign. Air takes five, earth three and water two, with six of the ten mutable. Mars, Neptune and Pluto sit inside four and a half degrees of Gemini, and Uranus on the last degree of Libra. The record says Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet, returned to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, which went badly, and died the same day as Stalin, so there were no flowers left for his funeral.

Jupiter sits in direct opposition to Saturn at under two thirds of a degree, and the reading is expansion against caution: the swing between taking too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. That record holds two of the worst-timed things available to a twentieth century composer. Returning to the Soviet Union in the nineteen thirties was one of them. Dying on the same day as Stalin, so that there were no flowers to be had, was not a decision at all, and it is the second.

Mercury sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at under a quarter of a degree, the tightest contact here, and the reading is learning that comes easily: breadth, genuine curiosity, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple. Peter and the Wolf is a piece whose entire purpose is making an orchestra comprehensible to a child, so that fit is exact enough to print and simple enough to check. The two contacts together give a composer who could explain anything and could not pick a moment.

His Moon sits on the twenty fourth degree of Libra at noon with Scorpio still possible, so it is left out, and a yod using that Moon with Mercury and Venus goes with it. A T-square closes on Pluto using Jupiter and Saturn, which is the same pair as above pressed from a third direction. No fire at all, in a composer with that output, is a count worth one line and no conclusion. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. He died at Moscow on 5 March 1953, at sixty one. Pluto stood square his natal Mercury at just over a quarter of a degree that day and Mercury sixty degrees from his natal Mars at under a third. The Moon was disseminating and eighty two per cent lit.