Costanzo Festa

Costanzo Festa
(b c1485–90; d Rome, 10 April 1545). Italian composer and singer, for many years (1517–45) a prominent member of the Cappella Sistina in Rome.

His birthplace, like that of his putative kinsman Sebastiano Festa, may have been in Piedmont, somewhere near Turin; in a papal breve of November 1517 he is referred to as a cleric (he apparently never became a priest) in the diocese of Turin.

The earliest notice of Festa as a composer is the attribution to him of a motet, Quis dabit oculis, written (as was a motet on the same text by Mouton) to commemorate the death (9 January 1514) of Anne of Brittany, Queen of France. Speculation that Festa may have spent some time studying in France (Lowinsky, 1968) remains unproved. The discovery that he visited Ferrara early in March, 1514, bringing with him several motets, tells us both that he could not have lingered in France and that he was by this time a recognized composer; the presence of Quis dabit in I-Bc Q19, a manuscript compiled in northern Italy c1516–19, suggests that this motet could have been among those brought by the composer to Ferrara.

At some point between 1510 and 1517 (probably the last few years in this period) Festa lived on the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples; he was employed as a music teacher for Rodrigo and Alfonso d'Avalos, members of a powerful Neapolitan princely family. A document recording this engagement refers to Festa as ‘musico celebrato’. In 1517 he joined the papal chapel in Rome; from this period come a group of motets in the Medici codex (I-Fl 666), including Super flumina Babylonis with its tenor on a requiem chant, a lament for an unspecified person (there is no proof that it was written for the death of Louis XII in 1515).