Yuri Grigorovich, known as the greatest living choreographer in the world of ballet, for his leadership of the Bolshoi from 1964 for thirty years, has died. He was a tough operator who was accused of being a tyrant but was clearly talented and able to put his stamp on Soviet ballet as it came to prominence as the showpiece of the classical dance world.
Born 2 January 1927, he started dancing young but was too short in stature to become a leading man.
What is wonderful about his chart is how it expresses both strands of his personality and life. He had an ambitious Capricorn Sun in a controlling opposition to Pluto (North Node), trine and sextile Mars in Taurus, which is where his autocratic streak came from. He also had a yod of Venus in Capricorn sextile Uranus inconjunct ethereal Neptune with Neptune exactly opposition Jupiter in Aquarius. That creative Neptunian yod gave him a purposeful direction in life – with his Jupiter on the ‘reaction point’ of the yod being especially sensitive.
A hard-driving personality focused on beauty, helped along by Jupiterian luck. Marvellous.
Again, thinking of the “Jupiterian luck” so many young men born in 1927 had across Europe and and the World. I went to see Grigorovich’s bio on Wiki to see if there was anything about the War years, but the English article is a stub. Apparently, another Soviet ballet great Yuri and a coworker Vladimirov died the same day. Vladimirov was another Sun Capricorn, born New Year’s day 1942, and in the middle of horrors of WWII, although in Vladimir Oblast where the Germans didn’t quite arrive.
I’d add that of the great Soviet artists, at least Mstislav Rostropovich was a fellow 1927 native. I remember this from his wife Galina Vishnevskaya’s memoir I read as a teenager. Vishnevskaya (October 12th 1926) was a Leningrad native, and told of her escape from the siege. It might be a fabulist account, but I think I will seek the volume, because the juxtaposition of the sheer brutality of Soviet life and the often rarified, yet constrained environment these people lived, fascinates me.