Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was the great bridge, the composer who carried the Austro-German Romantic tradition across into the modernism of the new century, and one of the most commanding conductors of his age. His chart is drenched in water, which is exactly what you hear in his music: symphonies vast enough to hold a whole cosmos of grief and rapture. His Sun sits in Cancer, the father shining through the sign of the mother, a deeply emotional, protective, sentimental soul who guards a squishy heart inside a hard shell. In the sixth house of work, duty and craft, that Sun made him a tireless perfectionist, the man who wore himself out conducting all season and could only compose in summers, insisting always on the highest standards.

His Moon in Pisces is the ultimate empath, the sponge, the psychic and saint-like nature that receives downloads from the universe and pours divine imagination into art. Rising in the first house, those emotions sit right beneath the skin, worn on the sleeve for all to feel. His Aquarius Ascendant marks the eccentric outsider, the black sheep who beat to his own drum. Born to humble Jewish parents in Bohemia, dogged by anti-Semitism in Vienna, he was neglected in life and rediscovered after 1945 as one of the most beloved composers of all.