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.