"Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I intend to erect a monument to this most beautiful of dreams." [Richard Wagner]

This is going to be a great love story. It is about the power of the eighth house. When two people merge, something is created that is more than both of them. Love takes many forms and for those of us who are older, the mentor relationship is one of the greatest love experiences of life. Love in the eighth house is an alchemical experience that is well known to fire creativity to a red hot coal. It is the mind that is penetrated rather than the body.

This is the story of Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer. It is about Wagner's worship of Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's complete indifference to Wagner. I, too, have loved this way and I, too, have someone to whom I could never properly express my gratitude who doesn't even know I'm alive :-)

I was inspired to do this article after reading Bryan Magee's book, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. I have read several books about Richard Wagner but this one I found so interesting that I was inspired to study Wagner's chart again to discover even more about this fascinating man.

Richard Wagner was a Gemini so I thought this was going to be about the magical, metaphysical Gemini. I've noticed that many composers have a prominent Gemini energy but I think Wagner might have gone over the edge with it.

The fact that so many composers have Gemini prominently in their charts reminds me that music is about communication. It is in fact the highest form of communication, at least in the minds of many great thinkers throughout the ages. It also has the virtue, like math, of being a universal language.

Math and music are ruled by Uranus and it turns out the talk tonight is about Uranus, Aquarius and some Leo as well.

This article takes us into the realm where philosophy and religion could meet. It sometimes takes the viewpoint of the philosopher but this is an interesting place to me because it is into the deeper levels of the 9th house that we will be traveling.

It has always been awkward to me that Uranus, the 11th house and Aquarius may be an impersonal power that some people call God. This is because my own viewpoints are religious and mystical as well as philosophical and mathematical. I can't imagine something as detached as the 11th house being God, but then again, it's not so hard to imagine at all. I know that really I feel like astrology permits me to read God's mind ... to the fullest extent I would be capable of doing that ... and I mean this in the way physicists mean it. The universe is mathematical and responds to the glyphs in the astrology charts just as it does to the notes on the staff.

This report reminded me that the 11th house is about the future and what I would call Universal Mind for lack of a better word. Wagner called it "the WILL" because Arthur Schopenhauer called it the Will. I am at a disadvantage with the things I'm going to be talking about because most of it transcends language.

Wagner has Pluto in the 11th house and acted as an evolutionary force as do many great geniuses.

Most serious writers do not include men of action in their lists of "greatest" but instead the usual candidates are Mozart followed by Goethe and Shakespeare. Of course there are other possibilities in all fields. People like Michelangelo, da Vinci and so forth. But there is an argument for Richard Wagner up there with the best, if you can really understand what happened. It was in fact, the goal of Wagner's life at one time to combine the impact and gifts of Beethoven and Shakespeare. He wrote his first opera before he was thirty. He was very talented but this goes far beyond "talent".

Wagner's thought developed throughout his lifetime, which is another reason I think this exploration is valuable to me. He began as a radical anarchist, using the less conscious end of Aquarian energy, and elevated this through his lifetime in some of the ways I will discuss until he reached the edge of Aquarius that is godlike, Promethean and heroic.

Someone like Bill Cosby is the very personification of the best of the 10th house with all its treasures. He is decent, upright, moral, ethical, fatherly, reliable, conscious and committed to the collective values.

In the life and thought of someone like Richard Wagner, we are now going to go beyond the known world, past the tenth house into the far reaches of the cosmos. Our feet are leaving the ground. Among artists and great thinkers, all barriers come down and the ideas and notions of what it means to be an individual are pushed to the limits. In the lives of people like this, there is a freedom which may border on license. Usually they excuse themselves for their lifestyles by referring to their greatness, almost as if there is no other choice. Certainly if Wagner hadn't lived the life he did, he would have been insane. I understand that some people have prejudices against eccentricity and alternative lifestyles, but to be an astrologer is to fly off into the future with these different and exceptional people at least in heart and mind to see what it is they were trying to accomplish.

As an intensely creative person, I find myself inspired by people like Wagner. It is an inescapable reality to me that there is more to life than the ordinary. Hermann Hesse wrote a great book for adolescents called SteppenWolf which describes the area where people move from the lawn to the forest, from the golf course to the jungle. People of great genius explore unknown worlds and do not take conventional values with them any more than you would take a golf club in to the Amazon.

As we move into the 11th and 12th houses, none of the same rules apply. This is the agony and the ecstasy of 11th and 12th house people, not to mention those who are chosen to work on the evolutionary edge by having Pluto aspect personal planets or angles on the chart.

So, you may not like Wagner because he slept with other men's wives and ran up debts. Wagner was not a Nazi. He died long before Hitler took power and was, in fact, a leftist, not a rightist.

Now we are going to step out into Wagner's world.
Wagner wrote The Ring trilogy which some consider to be the greatest work of art extant. Tolkien was inspired by this operatic work. However, it is Alberich the Nibelung's ring we are talking about and not Schmeagol's. You might say that The Ring is a higher octave of Tolkien's.

Wagner was a contemporary of the great Italian opera composer, great Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi wrote some fantastic operas that you have heard of such as Rigoletto, La Traviata, which is most people's "favorite opera", Masked Ball and Aida, another popular favorite. Verdi outlived Wagner, though they were born in the same year, and composed what are considered his two greatest operas, Falstaff and Othello after Wagner's death. Everyone wonders what Wagner might have done had he lived on. He was planning to move into symphony (to do completely without words) and also wanted to write a Buddhist opera.

Verdi and other Italians wrote operas by formula, much like best sellers today, and did not exactly mine the hot lava of Plutonic ore for their creative force. They dealt with emotions, even passions, naturally, but in a disciplined and controlled artistic manner which was the fashion until Wagner, often parodied as "melodrama".

Wagner poured hot lava into everything he did. This is what makes people who are not in touch with their own subconscious so uncomfortable listening to Wagner. It can be a painful and nearly impossible unbearable experience to listen to some of his music if you are not comfortable within yourself. This is, indeed, the very point.

Wagner hated this world because it was so difficult for him, as it is for many geniuses. He has written that not a single year of his adult life passed without his seriously contemplating suicide. He had bad nightmares as a child and was forced to sleep at the far end of the apartment because his brothers and sisters didn't want to be near him. This increased his nightmares. His father died early on and he is anyway generally conceived to be the child of a lover of his mother's, who was an actor and whom she subsequently married. This step father died when Wagner was 17. I don't think these things affected him very much. That is my opinion as an astrologer. With Pluto in the 11th house, Wager was destined to deal with a surfeit of Plutonic energy. The collective unconscious poured unmodulated onto the pallet on which he slept as a child.

In his early manhood, Wagner was influenced by Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, the great anarchist who fought a turf war with Carl Marx at the First International and lost. Bakunin, who so looked the part of an anarchist, was Russian, 6'4" and well over 250 lbs. He says himself that he was far surpassed by Marx in education and theory and that is not hard to believe when I tell you this anecdote.

When Wagner tried to tell him about his projected stage work to be called Jesus of Nazareth, Bakunin requested Wagner with great vehemence to make certain Jesus would be represented as a weak character. "As to the music", says Wagner, "he advised me to compose only one passage but in all possible variations: the tenor was to sing "Off with his head!", the soprano "To the gallows!" and the basso continuo "Fire! Fire!" [All quotes in this article are from The Tristan Chord by Bryan Magee.]

Bakunin held many young rebels in thrall during the restless 1830s and 40s in Europe. There were uprisings all over Europe in the 1840s and around 1849, Wagner participated in one of these with Bakunin in Dresden. Bakunin was arrested and spent many years in Dutch, Austrian and Russian prisons as a result. Wagner escaped but had to live in exile for most of his life as a result.

This is another less conscious use of the 11th house and Aquarius, to rebel against authority per se but more especially to look for political solutions to problems. There is a mistaken belief that an evil power has taken over whereas many would observe that this is just the human condition.

Richard Wagner matured as most of us do and as he took on the responsibilities and outlook of middle age, where one begins to become the authority figure one has fought against, he began to realize that most authority figures are well meaning, mostly competent, often overwhelmed by the demands of what they are required to accomplish, etc. etc. but that they are ordinary humans not evil agents of a dark force, for the most part. And that this is not the only bad government, ruler, country, etc., but that there really has never been the paradise we are so sure of when as young people we set out to discover the promised land.

So, like some intelligent, mature people, he moved the search within. He withdrew from the outer world and began to seek the kingdom within. However, he was not a religious individual.

Wagner's switch from radical politics to metaphysical inquiry occurred in one stupendous year, 1854, the year when he first read The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer. He was forty-one years old.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who was obscure at the time Wagner read his book. Schopenhauer wrote this book in 1818 as he was turning thirty (the famous Saturn Return). It was ignored, neither read nor reviewed. Schopenhauer continued to work in obscurity, updating and expanding his book in 1844. It was ignored for another ten years. Schopenhauer's fame came suddenly, six years before his death in 1854.

One of the reasons for Schopenhauer's obscurity was that Hegel was holding court in Europe during the 1840s in a uniquely exclusive manner. It was his philosophy, as you recall, on which Marxism was based. He is the person who proposed the thesis, antithesis and synthesis which is ground zero of metaphysics. This is called the Axiom of Maria in esoterics or in Joseph Murphy's happy little world, the one-two-three of prayer. Jung himself studied the space between three and four for many years. The oceanic world of the philosopher laps up onto the shore of the mystic, but almost certainly without the philosopher's knowing it. A mystic can know a philosopher but not the other way around.

This same principle is described in the Tao Te-Ching as: "The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things." YOu can see that western philosophers were reinventing the wheel when you realize the Tao Te-Ching was one of the oldest books in the world. You have to have some intuition, though, to see that Hegel and the Tao were saying the same thing.

Hegel influenced Carl Marx who took an idealistic philosophy and applied it to the material world. We now know the difficulties with this proposition, but at the time, people were experimenting with new ideas.

There were a few more important thinkers in this chain but eventually Kant took it one step further and upon that built Schopenhauer. The intellectual pursuits and culture of Germany were so far removed from those of England and France, the European mainstream, that Kant's work, now considered to be the greatest philosophical event since the ancient Greeks, was not translated from German until many years later. The cultural life of Germany was isolated. As you remember, the Romans never conquered Germany and thus their culture was not romanized like the rest of Europe. They were predominant in the field of music but felt and were considered to be inferior in every other form of art and intellectual pursuit.

The interesting thing about Schopenhauer is that, although he reached his conclusion about the world from a philosophical perspective, he then realized that his conclusions were those of two of the great religions of the world, namely Hinduism and Buddhism. (Buddhism historically evolved from Hinduism.) Still, Schopenhauer was a philosopher and not "religious" any more than Richard Wagner.

The "eastern" ideas of these religions were just being introduced into Germany/Europe at that time and Schopenhauer's mother introduced him to one of the scholars who was translating these religious writings. Schopenhauer put the conclusions of Buddhism back into a dualistic European viewpoint and believe me, there are some things that fall through the cracks. Philosophy is not religion.

To clarify the way I see the difference … if I tell you that this is Holy Water and you look upon it with reverence and awe, you are religious. If I tell you this is Holy Water and you tell me you look on it with reverence and awe for these reasons, blah blah blah, you are a philosopher, not because what you say is diminished or that you lack the ability to articulate it well, but because you feel you can substantiate something that is a matter of faith. That's my "issue" with philosophers, even though I am a 9th house person.

Roughly the common ground between Schopenhauer and Buddhists is this. Schopenhauer believed that the world is a place of suffering and pain. Therefore compassion is the highest morality and detachment is the only conceivable goal, approach and viewpoint open to rational people.

I connect Buddhism with Taurus (Wesak Full Moon) or "earth" and the 12th house and you will see this signature in Schopenhauer 's chart and also in Wagner's by transit as well as natally. It is not reductionism to say that this is a worldview that someone with these charts would eventually have. However Buddhism is associated in many minds with people who have suffered greatly or perhaps one special event of suffering.

The "Will", that Schopenhauer describes in The World as Will and Representation is that Universal Mind of the 11th house which Stanley Kubrick has also described. (There is a connection between genuine science fiction and the 11th house.) Kubrick says, "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning…."

What Schopenhauer said that struck Wagner like a bolt of lightning, was that music was the language of the Will or Universal Mind and through other arguments put forth the proposition that opera was the greatest art form. For this Wagner said, "How can I thank him enough?"

Wagner, doomed always to unrequited love, it seems, sent his libretto for The Ring to Schopenhauer in an act of abject adoration. He felt he could speak volumes but instead, sent a cover note that said, "With reverence and gratitude." He felt, uncharacteristically, that if Schopenhauer couldn't figure out who he was by reading the libretto, a lot of words wouldn't help. Schopenhauer misinterpreted this as rudeness and did not reply.

Nevertheless, Wagner's life changed from this moment forward. 1854, then, was the ultimately decisive year of Wagner's creative life. In one of those amazing coincidences in real life, the author Magee reminds us of Schopenhauer's dictum that "up to the age of forty-two the life of each one of us in like the text of a volume, the rest of which consists of commentary. The commentary may be ever so profound, but it does not add to the stock of original material."

This is something each person may wish to contemplate for himself or herself. However, once again, Wagner stepped into the breach of Schopenhauer's ideological world by making contact with Schopenhauer in his forty second year. On fire with inspiration -- Schopenhauer having set his music free -- Wagner sat down and composed his opera Tristan and Isolde with "ungovernable excitement", almost as if it were improvised.

Wagner said, "As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated.

Bryan Magge described Wagner's creative frenzy over Tristan this way. "The white heat of Tristan, that ungovernable excitement, was never again to appear in his work. Wagner's own word for it was ecstasy and it marked, among other things, the honeymoon of his love affair with Schopenhauer. That love affair became a marriage that lasted until the end of Wagner's life. And it was a marriage in which the passion never died."

The World as Will and Representation is almost one thousand pages long and Wagner read it four times in the year 1854, while also composing Tristan, and many times after that until the day he died.

This is how Schopenhauer's philosophy affected Wagner's music and the course of music to follow. Remembering that, if music is the voice of the Universal Mind, then something else very big happened to us as well. I'm going to quote six paragraphs directly from Magee because I'm not an expert in music and would not be able to reconstruct this information in a meaningful way, although anyone can understand what is being said even without musical training.

"Schopenhauer maintained that we human beings are, in the most literal sense, embodiment of the metaphysical will, so that willing, wanting, longing, craving, yearning, are not just things that we do; they are what we are. And music was the voice of this in the empirical world.

"Music proceeds by creating certain wants which it then spins out before satisfying. Even the most simple melody, considered as a succession of single notes, makes us want it to close eventually on the tonic, no matter how widely it may range before it does so, and it provokes in us a baffled dissatisfaction if it ends on any note other than that; indeed, the melody has to end not only on that one note but on a strong beat in the rhythm at the same time….

"Schopenhauer gives special attention to a technical device in harmony knows as "suspension" - and it was this that lit a beacon in Wagner's head. In its ordinary use it comes as the penultimate chord of a piece of music, when we have just heard what we thought was going to be the penultimate chord.

"When it goes to discord before going to tonic, we gasp and suspend out breath. The suspense is prolonged and not just prolonged but screwed up a notch."

"Reading this seems to have given Wagner a simple yet utterly astounding musical idea, the idea of composing a whole piece of music, indeed a whole opera, in the way that suspension operates. The music would move all the way through from discord to discord in such a manner that the ear was on tenterhooks throughout for a resolution that did not come. (comment: one long tease in other words) As Schopenhauer had spelt out, this would be a purely musical equivalent of the unassuaged longing, craving, yearning, that is our life, that indeed is us

"The first chord of Tristan, known simply as "the Tristan chord" remains the most famous single chord in the history of music. It contains within itself not one but two dissonances, thus creating within the listener a double desire, agonizing in its intensity, for resolution. The chord to which it then moves resolves one of these dissonances but not the other, thus providing resolution-yet-not-resolution. And so the music proceeds … so that at every moment the musical ear is being partially satisfied yet at the same time frustrated. And this carries on the whole evening."

If music is the expression of the Will, we have moved to a new frontier. Tristan was so different it was not successfully staged for five more years. Singers couldn't sing it. The orchestra could not play it. The project was disbanded after no less than seventy seven rehearsals and from this point on many were sure that Wagner was quite mad.

The influence of Schopenhauer's philosophy was evident in the next three operas Wagner produced after reading The World. Tristan dealt with sexual love. The Mastersingers dealt with the arts, particularly opera, and Parsifal, with a "compassion-based self-abnegating mysticism". These are the three ways that Schopenhauer suggests it is possible to live in this world and contact the Will: sexual love, the arts (especially music) and a "compassion-based self-abnegating mysticism".

Schopenhauer and Wagner never met. Apparently Wagner visited Frankfurt the last year of Schopenhauer's life and talked about visiting him but could not work up the courage in the end. For Wagner to feel intimidated in the presence of someone was a unique experience.

The Schopenhauer-inspired Tristan and Isolde became publicly available the year Schopenhauer died but it is unlikely that he knew of it as he had not been unduly impressed with Wagner at any time in the past.

Magee comments, "All of this wasn't lost on Wagner who wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonk, 'How beautiful it is that the old man knows nothing at all of what he is to me, or of what I am to myself through him.' And to the day of his own death his attitude was that expressed by his hearty-cry, already quoted, "How can I think him enough?'"

There is one more thing I would like to point out about Wagner's life and that is at this time in his life he was also at his very lowest. By the time he had reached the age of fifty-one, his personal situation appeared hopeless. Magee comments, "He had composed Rhinegold, Valkyrie and Tristan without any of them having been performed or possessing any prospect of performance; he had abandoned work on The Ring, seemingly for good; and he had just been compelled to flee Vienna (where he was by that time living), to avoid imprisonment for debt, and was now on the run. His recent premiere of Tannhauser was considered an absolute mockery and flop. He was publicly ridiculed for it.

And now the fairy tale begins. Onto the scene stepped "Mad" King Ludwig, (perhaps two of a kind?), who at eighteen years old worshipped the ground Wagner walked on and had just inherited a wealthy kingdom in Bavaria from his father who died prematurely at fifty-three. One of Ludwig's first acts as king was to send messengers to bring Wagner to him. They had trouble finding Wagner because he was on the run. Nevertheless, Wagner appeared, the King settled his debts for him, he was housed, fed, his operas produced and ultimately Bayreuth was built to his personal specifications, all on the gratuity of King Ludwig. At last Wagner had found the father he deserved (!) At this time Wagner also began an intense friendship with Nietzsche and for many years the two were inseparable. (Nietzsche later turned on Wagner, which was to be expected.)

Wagner also ended his long-dead marriage to Minna at this time and began a long affair with Cosima, the illegitimate daughter of Franz Lizst, who eventually gave him three illegitimate children and whom he later married. In Cosima he found his "salvation".

At about this same time, Wagner met young Friedrich Nietzsche, later to become one of Germany's most famous philosophers. Wagner never seems to have identified his genius, however. A fast friendship began and it is also likely that the young man became infatuated with Frau Wagner as well. This is Nietzsche's chart.

"I am not a man, I am dynamite," said Nietzsche, the man with all that Uranian energy.

Wagner culminated his eight year friendship with Nietzsche by betraying him inadvertently in a very personal and unforgivable way. His influence on Nietzsche was overwhelming but not vice versa. Wagner became something of a father figure, making his betrayal all the more damaging. I think Magee alludes to this as the reason Nietzsche went over the edge (mental breakdown which became complete a few years later). It is difficult to establish naturally and is a popularly debated point. Syphilis is the usual reason given. At any rate, Nietzsche was cared for by his mother and sister for the last years of his life. His final breakdown occurred in 1889.

This is a link to a chart interpretation about Nietzsche. It it one person's view of the chart. There is also an excellent article by Al Siebert on whether or not Nietzsche was a schizophrenia and, if so, how that relates to the survivor personality, Uebermensch, etc. For a complete article on Nietzsche, including a learning tutorial, click here.

You can see that Wagner's life transcends the norms as perhaps all of ours might, could or should, depending on outlook, or at least all of us who want to push the envelope on what it means to be human. Most of the people in this article were Aquarian or Uranian in nature.

Let's take a look at Wagner's chart and learn some astrology. But before I show the chart, I recommend that you read the 380 page book, The Tristan Chord by Bryan Magee its entirety if this topic interests you.

Here's Wagner's chart.

When I describe material from birth charts, I like to make it as simple as possible. Any major theme will be echoed with variations and trills, but the main theme is the one that I focus on as I do not like to be distracted with TMI (too much information_ myself.

The first thing I see is that during his life, Wagner's Pluto in Pisces in the 11th transited through his 12th house and when it finally crossed his Ascendant he died. This is the best explanation for the intensity of his life and the depths he plumbed for his creative material - when this was hooked up to his Moon Nodes going from Aquarius to Leo.

Hero worship, such a part of Wagner's life -- Wagner to Schopenhauer, Ludwig to Wagner, Nietzsche to Wagner) is a Leo signature. You can see the virtue of it and how well it works by the way each of these men was inspired to greater heights. It is also the doom of this signature to outgrow your mentor, which is the case with Nietzsche.

The relationship with Nietzsche and Wagner might be compared to the one between Freud and Jung. Jung, himself a Leo, has the fate to transcend his "father". This is a Leo signature.

Here are some quotes or observations about Wagner with a key to where they are found in his chart.

• Wagner as actor, clown and circus - this is a characteristic of Gemini combined with Leo (North Node)
  
  
• Wagner's skin condition - overall irritation and annoyance with life Mercury square Mars and Mercury square Uranus
  
  
• Everything that was revealed to Wagner in reading Schopenhauer had already been put intuitively into his operas, years before - buried intuitive, talented but latent, is indicated by Saturn in the 9th house - also a development of his Neptune in Sagittarius in the 7th
  
  
• Grail legend: A king is crippled or ill; as a result his land is barren; the hero heals the king and fertility is restored to the land; probably the hero's feat shows that he is the rightful heir -- this is Wagner's particular telling of the tale - this combines his Saturn in Capricorn in the 9th (an old king who is spiritually wounded) and his North Node in Leo, the conquering hero
  
  
• "the foundation of ethics is not rationality but compassion" (p. 273) - Wagner's afflicted 9th house, the house of ethics, where he has unlimited potention to grow and must explore the area of ethics from all possible perspectives - also an evolution of his Neptune in Sagittarius in the 7th
  
  
• "the music has an enormously powerful drive of assertiveness that seems to be sweeping everything before it, an unremitting vehemence that never for one moment lets up" (p 274) - Pluto in the 11th house, Sun opposite Uranus, Moon and Mars in Aquarius, South Node in Aquarius (the hurricane winds of change)
  
  
• The outlines of the secret become clearer as writer after writer takes up the theme and makes his own sense of it, but we are never told in plain language exactly what the Grail means" (p. 273) - use of the universal language of myth and a retelling of myth are a healing use of the Saturn in Capricorn in the 9th house. Like Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I am great, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giant." This is a lesson that Wagner was learning in his 9th house.

• Wagner's Saturn in Capricorn and North Node in Leo:
  • Wotan - characterizes Wagner's Capricorn in the 9th; a character consumed with interest in the responsiblity of ruling a world order
  • Hans Sach refusing to play King Mark and therefore yielding his love to a younger, more suitable man - another wise man of the Capricorn in the 9th house type
  • Wagner : Schopenhauer as King Ludwig : Wagner as Wagner : Nietzsche - Leo writ large
  • Schopenhauer's writing style which stood on the shoulders of those who had gone before, thus teaching Wagner now to think - Saturn in Capricorn in the 9th
• Sehnsucht - Wahn(fried) - Mitgleid - three different levels of love (passion, peace of mind and compassion)
• Wagner at two levels of will - Aquarius energies
• Wagner supplies the Uranian WILL to Schopenhauer's Piscean DESPAIR - the long trek of Pluto through his 11th and 12th houses
• to call Schopenhauer a pessimist is to remain outside the very mysticism he is espousing
• Wagner's ear - Gemini
• Themes:
  • older man telling a heroic but clueless younger man how to do it - Capricorn and Leo
  • dying for love -
  • being redeemed through love -
  • transformation through love -
• Dualities - Gemini:
  • librettist and composer
  • the Wagner you know by knowing his operas and having watched them and the one you hear about due to Hitler
  • librettist and composer
  • left wing anarchist or right wing nationalist
  • THE MIND and THE DESIRE TO COMMUNICATE
    • no other composer could have seriously tackled philosophy
    • he left a very reputable autobiography that is a significant document in European cultural history
    • combine Shakespeare and Beethoven
• Shakespeare [link to chart] - as a writer, Cancer vs. Aquarius contrasting the detachment with the intimate involvement
• Beethoven [link to chart] - Leo and Aquarius differences
• Verdi [link to chart] - compare use of Saturn in Capricorn in the 8th vs. the 9th and the use of the same Moon Nodes
  • different uses of passion
  • amount of discipline in work
  • pivotal opera, Rigoletto (when was it written compared to Wagner's Die Meistersanger)