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