Costanzo Festa (c.
1495 –
April 10,
1545) was an
Italian composer of the
Renaissance. He is best known for
his
madrigals, but he also wrote
sacred
vocal music.
Not much is known about his early life. His
birth date has been given as early as
1480 and as late as 1495. In
1517 he began employment with
Pope Leo X as a singer, and his
first verifiable work dates from
1514. A communication from
1543 indicates that he was too
sick to travel with the Pope to
Bologna, and he died in 1545.
Evidently he lived in
Rome most of his life, most
likely serving in the
Papal Choir.
Festa was one of the few Italians in the Papal
Choir. He was a master of the
Netherlands
contrapuntal technique, however,
and his importance to music history is as the one who first
brought the two musical styles, the Italian and the Netherlandish,
together. In addition, he was an obvious influence on
Palestrina, who modeled many of
his early works after his.
Most of Festa's madrigals are for three voices
(in contrast to the other early madrigalist,
Verdelot, who preferred five or
six). He liked quick, rhythmically active passages in his
madrigals; this may reflect an influence from the contemporary
vocal form of the
villanesca. In addition he wrote
extended
homophonic sections, showing
somewhat less an influence from the contemporary
motet, in contrast to the
motet-like imitative passages found in Verdelot.
In addition to his madrigals, published mostly
between 1543 and
1549, several collections of his
sacred works were published during his lifetime, among them four
masses, over forty motets, and numerous
Magnificats and
Marian Litanies (for two
choruses, each with four voices). The style of his sacred music
matches that of his
secular: he is less fond of
imitation and complex counterpoint for its own sake, and often
writes purely homophonic passages. Since Rome was musically
conservative compared to the rest of Italy (and
Europe) at the time, and there
was a strong reaction against counterpoint within two decades
after his death (expressly stated by the
Council of Trent), his stylistic
bent may represent a foreshadowing of that event; perhaps he was
responding to the taste and needs of his papal employer.