Igor Stravinsky

On May 29, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the audience at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring began to jeer within minutes. The music, with its pounding, irregular rhythms and harsh dissonances, and Vaslav Nijinsky's jerky, stamping choreography provoked shouting, whistling and fights in the aisles. The premiere went down as perhaps the most notorious scandal in the history of music, and The Rite became one of the most influential works of the twentieth century.

Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia. No record of his birth hour survives, so his Ascendant is unknown, but his planets are revealing. His Sun is in late Gemini, with Jupiter also in Gemini. Gemini is restless, curious and endlessly changeable, and Jupiter magnifies it. Stravinsky reinvented his musical style several times: from the lush Russian ballets of his early career to the cool neoclassicism of works like Pulcinella and the Symphony of Psalms, and finally, in old age, to the twelve-tone techniques he had once rejected.

Cancer holds his Moon, Mercury and Venus, and it governs memory, roots and the homeland. Cancer clings to the past and to the homeland. Stravinsky's early masterpieces drew on Russian folk melodies and legends, and although he left Russia in his twenties and lived the rest of his life in exile, his music never lost its Russian character.

Saturn and Neptune are both in Taurus, the sign of the earth, the body and primal physical rhythm. Taurus planets describe a deep connection to the earth and to rhythm felt in the body, and The Rite of Spring, subtitled Pictures of Pagan Russia, depicts an ancient earth ritual in which a young woman dances herself to death to bring on the spring.

His father, Fyodor, was a celebrated bass singer at the Mariinsky Theatre. Igor studied law at the university in St. Petersburg but took private lessons with the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. The impresario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned The Firebird for his Ballets Russes in 1910, followed by Petrushka in 1911 and then The Rite.

Mars in Leo adds pride and a forceful creative will, and Uranus in Virgo describes precise, revolutionary innovation in technique. Stravinsky was meticulous in his scores and famously exacting about how his music should be performed.

He lived in Switzerland and France before settling in the United States in 1939, becoming an American citizen in 1945. He composed the opera The Rake's Progress there and continued working into his eighties. He died in New York on April 6, 1971, and was buried in Venice, near Diaghilev. The Gemini Sun kept him reinventing; the Cancer planets kept him Russian.