TAURUS — The Velvet Gentleman Meets Ferdinand the Bull
The Calming Vexations of Eric Satie—with side trips to Russian Superstars
The Story of Ferdinand, a children’s book, became wildly popular months after the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. Never out of print since, the book was the #1 bestseller in 1938 surpassing even Gone With the Wind. The story by Munro Leaf illustrated by Robert Lawson was loosely based on Civilón, an actual bull in Ronda, where Spain’s oldest bullfighting ring still operates.
As it happened, Civilón would not be provoked to charge a red flag, preferring to placidly smell the flowers. The Spanish press secured a pardon for the popular bull, but Civilón was slaughtered anyway by Franco’s fascists at the war’s onset—news eclipsed by screaming headlines. The popular tale of flower-powered non-violence was considered subversive on several fronts. Life magazine noted that various critics saw the book as promoting fascism or passivism or the sit-down strike—among the feisty labor movement’s preferred tactics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer denounced The Story of Ferdinand for corrupting American youth. Adolf Hitler, while claiming it was degenerate propaganda, ordered the book burned. Admired by Thomas Mann, Gandhi, and the Roosevelts, 30,000 copies of The Story of Ferdinand were rushed to the children of Germany after WWII ended in 1945.
What does this controversial children’s fable tell us about the power of Taurus? What can we learn from astrology about a haul of famous Taurean composers: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Satie? Why select from such an impressive group the unassuming figure of Eric Satie for special attention?
Taurus is among the sky’s most dazzling constellations made up of the super-brilliant stars Aldebaran and Elnath with two glittering star clusters. In Greek mythology Taurus is lusty Zeus disguised as the great white bull who abducts the Phoenician maiden Europa in one of his extramarital escapades. Aldebaran’s red glow marks the bull’s eye. Elnath defines the uppermost horn’s point. The bull is often depicted with its front legs folded to allow the enchanted Europa to festoon his horns with flower garlands and to invite her to climb his back, whereupon he gallops away like the wind. The face of Taurus is the Hyades, a star cluster associated with spring rain. Not far away is a companion cluster of “seven sisters” called the Pleiades defining the hairy arc of his shoulders. Six of these sisters married gods prompting more mythic dramas for each, while the faintest star Merope married a mortal—Sisyphus forever rolling a stone uphill.
Taurus is a fixed sign ruled by Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Natives may sometimes be dismissed as lazy but are actually quite diligent with high standards and a good work ethic. Standing its ground with earthbound contentment in a state of wonder for the natural world, Taurus is practically a music-making machine. Courtney O’Reilly in Astrology (Taschen, 2020) tells us “…Taurus rules the throat, vocal cords, and thyroid as well as the ears. Taureans are sensitive to sound—as a sign ruled by Venus, they have a refined ear for music and often have quite skilled vocal abilities. They adore the arts…”.
Most Taurus singers wade in the water of popular culture like sacred bulls in the Ganges, sometimes crossing over into classical and other music genres—e.g., Adele, tenor Andrea Bocelli, Cher, Kelly Clarkson, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Enrique Iglesias, Janet Jackson, Billy Joel, Lizzo, Patti LuPone, Willie Nelson, soprano Birgit Nilsson, Luther Vandross, and Stevie Wonder. Of this group, Ella Fitzgerald & Barbra Streisand can be thought of as paradigmatic.
Perhaps our quartet of Taurus composers can give us more creative fodder for following personality traits in their musical output. The solidly reliable and generally unsurprising craftmanship of Johannes Brahms with his stolid comfort food orchestration reaches transcendent heights of Taurean humanity in the composer’s choral music. The profoundly sustained ardor of “Then all flesh is as the grass” from A German Requiem stands out, as does the ravishing Song of Destiny, another burnished choral work with orchestra. Tobias Brommann, Choral director at Berlin Cathedral offers, “Like no other composer, Brahms mastered what in jazz is called ‘voicing’, with his feel for tessitura of the choral parts and his skill in combining these to create a marvelous sound texture.” He cites the sustained vocal demands and technical challenges, as well as the deep rewards as reasons for why singers especially love performing this repertoire. Here the Brahms orchestration with choral tapestries becomes a force of nature.
Our two Russian composers dominate the world of ballet. Taurus is wholly conversant with and can dramatize with conflict the appetites of life—food, pleasure, and sleep. The three-act story ballets of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev have no equals in the repertoire. Tchaikovsky liberated the ravenous passion of Taurus with his fantasy ballets Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, drenched in observation of nature and the human condition, while Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette and Cinderella surround smoldering love—real and imagined—with earthbound intrigue, political avarice, and trivial domestic machinations. Better than plays or opera, with ballet these far-sighted composers patterned the cinematic experience sustained over several hours with vivid details and grand gestures underscored by soaring melodies, repeated motives, clues, codes, messages, subliminal sounds, and importantly—kinetic rhythms. Taurus is able to create entire worlds, while sitting in his pasture smelling the flowers.
Given all of this large scale Romantic expression (not to mention seventeen symphonies and a dozen-or-so concertos among this trio), even some astrologers are ill-equipped to understand how the modest and eccentric Eric Satie embodies his sign. He challenges our observational skills. We must always remember that the personality tells us about the sign, then collectively over time the sign tells us about the personality.
Since recorded music became ubiquitous in the 1950s with the advent of the LP, the general public knows Satie mostly in the serene orchestrations that fanboy Claude Debussy made of the 1888-95 piano work Trois Gymnopédies to help the struggling composer earn royalties. This musical marriage is not ironic or impressionistic. It is certainly French but with the distant air of ancient Greece. Instead, the music seems to inhabit a world apart—timeless, placid, suffused by the light of morning, midday, or twilight—a sad sunlit saraband played with gravity.
Today the popularity of Trois Gymnopédies has only increased with an arrangement for cello and orchestra receiving 75,375,000+ plays on Spotify! Nothing else composed by Satie broadly resonates, as he remained stubbornly experimental, yet his ideas broke ground and exerted influence. The one-act absurdist ballet Parade paired him with Cocteau and Picasso giving high-profile focus to the anti-Romantic ideas of the Dada movement while yielding a score replete with typewriter that can best be described as a collage. His “Furniture Music” intended to be largely ignored by the listener ultimately gave birth to Ambient Music, a well-established genre.
Perhaps his most radical music composed in 1893 was Vexations, less than a page of keyboard music to be performed 840 times:
Unpublished and never performed in his lifetime, this page mystique was discovered, as the story goes, on the floor of Satie’s undisturbed apartment by John Cage in 1949. Cage was in Paris at the behest of his friend Pierre Boulez (a quintessential Aries, born March 26, 1925), who had arranged a musical exchange. Cage’s nineteen-movement Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano lasting about eighty minutes was performed for Boulez’s mentor Olivier Messiaen, who reciprocated with a performance (presumably by his other mentee pianist Yvonne Loriod) of Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus, in twenty movements, lasting nearly two hours.
Cage published Vexations in 1949 and arranged for its somewhat truncated premiere in 1963 lasting 18 hours. To celebrate Cage 100, the composer’s centenary in 2012, Jacaranda Music engaged 36 pianists to each perform 23 repetitions, with twelve pianists adding one more to reach 840. The pianists were: Adam Tendler, Scott Dunn, Aron Kallay, Mark Robson, Susan Svrček, Yevgeniy Milyavskiy, Richard Valitutto, Bryan Pezzone, Emi Tamura, Hojoon Kim, Hannah Hudson, Wendy Tahara, Veronika Krausas, Melissa Alcazar, Tali Tadmor, Ingrid Lee, Ming Tsu, Helane Anderson, Mark Menzies, Matthew Lucas, Twyla Meyer, Joanne Pearce Martin, Gavin Martin, Antoinette Perry, Vicki Ray, Isaac Shankler, Dzovig Markarian, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Markus Pawlik, Christoph Bull, Steven Vanhauwaert, and Mark Alan Hilt.
This unprecedented continuous performance lasted over 24 hours in Santa Monica’s Miles Playhouse. Performed by Aron Kallay around 8:30 pm, the sample of the concert below lasts 4’33” (a nod to Cage’s most notorious composition). The sounds of the audience coming and going can be listened to as music.
Vexations was composed the same year that Satie’s only romantic liaison ended after five months. He proposed marriage after the first passionate night of lovemaking, but the independent-minded painter Suzanne Valadon, who had moved next door, declined leaving Satie devastated. A somewhat cropped version of her c. 1892 portrait of him can be seen at the heading. Any correlation to this life-changing rejection is pure speculation, but Satie was known to liberally consume alcohol, and died at age 59 of cirrhosis of the liver.
Although impeccably dressed in a series of uniforms, starting with seven identical smoky gray velvet suits, Satie lived alone in abject squalor. He was affectionate with groups of friends but would eventually dismiss them without explanation. Satie’s break with Ravel was so resolute Ravel refused to attend his former friend’s funeral. To add further complexity to his profile, Satie made a living writing for many publications including Vanity Fair using 25 pen names including that of a woman.
Here is a case where only deeper examination of Satie’s whole chart can divine what his earthy sun sign tells us. An AI-generated reading online of his chart draws attention to the dominance of fire and the extreme sensitivity of his moon in Cancer. This potentially revolutionary new tool demands careful attention.
Also, to my knowledge, astrology has yet to reconcile the latest thinking in psychology with birth chart information, but it’s not difficult to conclude, as they say, that Eric Satie was likely on the “spectrum.”