Costanzo Festa

Costanzo Festa (c. 1485/1490 – 10 April 1545) was an Italian composer of the Renaissance. While he is best known for his madrigals, he also wrote sacred vocal music. He was the first native Italian polyphonist of international renown, and with Philippe Verdelot, one of the first to write madrigals, in the infancy of that most popular of all sixteenth-century Italian musical forms.

Life Not much is known about his early life. He was probably born in the Piedmont near Turin, but the evidence is not certain, being based mainly on later documents referring to him as a clericis secularibus, i.e. not a monk, from that region. His birth date has been given as early as 1480 and as late as 1495, but recent scholarship has tended to narrow the range to the late 1480s. In addition he may have been related to his slightly younger contemporary Sebastiano Festa, another early madrigal composer, also from the same region. Sebastiano's father, Jacobinus, was a resident in Turin around 1520.

In early 1514, Festa wrote a motet, Quis dabit oculis, on the occasion of the death of the Queen of France (Anne of Brittany) (9 January 1514). Anne's funeral was an extensive affair, lasting 40 days; Johannes Prioris also composed music for it. This motet is the earliest datable composition of Festa's, and the first record of his activity.

Festa was active as a composer throughout the period, and some of the earliest madrigals identifiable as such, by any composer, may come from his pen and date from the mid 1520s; only some compositions by Bernardo Pisano, Sebastiano Festa, and possibly Philippe Verdelot may predate them by a few years. While he was unsuccessful in his attempted sale to the Venetian printer in 1536, a Roman firm produced a book of madrigals in 1538, as a result of the privilege granted, but most of it has been lost. In 1537, a Venetian firm printed a collection of his madrigals for three voices.