Costanzo Festa

Costanzo Festa was the first great Italian composer of the Renaissance, the first to fully assimilate the polyphonic techniques of the Franco-Flemish school, and working a full half century before Palestrina.  He was the Italian member of the triumvirate developers of the madrigal, the other two being Arcadeldt and Verdelot.  His work was know all over Europe as shown by the distribution of manuscripts and prints of his music, but primarily those at the Vatican where he worked for nearly 30 years, writing mostly motets for the Papal Chapel . . . he wrote over 60 of them.  His madrigals are too numerous to tally.

Perhaps, Costanzo Festa was born and raised in the Piedmont in the 1480s.  He is described as working for the d’Avolos family 1510-1517 in Ischia, but how he came to write funeral motets for the Queen and King of France in 1514 and 1515 is a puzzle . . . the corpses must have been in an advanced state of decay before the music arrived.  But his presence in the Papal Chapel is definitely affirmed by that connoisseur  of fine music, Leo X, where he states that Festa was “in capella nostra cantor” on November 1st, 1517. 

April 10th, 1545, Costanzo Festa died . . . the Sistine diaries describe all the singers of the Papal Chapel gathered at S. Maria in Traspontina for the burial of “Constantius Festa musicus eccelentissimus . . . “.