Ludwig van Beethoven

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Ludwig van Beethoven stands among the most revered figures in all of Western music, the titan who carried the art from the Classical age of Haydn and Mozart into the storm and fire of the Romantic era. His chart burns with a double Sagittarius signature, Sun and Moon both in the Jupiter-ruled sign of the philosopher-explorer, that free spirit who thinks in grand top-down visions and whose peace of mind depends on freedom and the open road. Here is the restless idealist, blunt to the point of harshness, forever reaching past the horizon toward something larger, God, the universe, the whole of humankind, which is exactly what he poured into the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony.

Both luminaries fall in the fifth house, the very house of the Sun, of creativity, romance and self-expression: this is a wellspring of raw creative genius, where imagination outranks knowledge and every work becomes a beloved child. His Leo Ascendant crowned him with the regal, magnetic presence of the lion, the proud performer born to lead. Deafness closed over him after 1802, yet from that silence came the late sonatas, the Missa solemnis and the Ninth, a Phoenix of sound composed by a man who could no longer hear it.