Luogo e data di registrazione		Chapel of Cistercian Abdij Marienlof (Belgium) - 9/11 January 1993
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer / Editing		Markus Heiland (Tritonus)
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Sony / Vivarte - SK 53 116 - (1 CD) - durata 67' 45" - (p) 1994 - DDD
	Cover Art		"The Conversion of Saulus" by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1526-1593) - Photo: Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

Costanzo Festa - A Roman Career In the third chapter of his Ragíonamenti Accademici the Tuscan humanist and diplomat Cosimo Bartoli (1503-1572) discussed the generation of composers of around 1540. Of Costanzo Festa, he wrote the following: “I got to know the gifted composer Constanzio Festa in Rome at the time of Pope Leo of fond memory - his compositions have no small reputation.” This was no exaggeration, as Costanzo Festa was, in fact, the very first internationally known Italian Renaissance composer. He wrote, before Palestrina, works which could measure up qualitatively with Flemish, French and Spanish compositions. He also played a prominent rôle as mediator between the widespread Northern polyphonic style and the new madrigal generation. In fact, as the first Italian to work in this genre, Costanzo Festa composed madrigals along with Verdelot and Arcadelt, the founders of the new style. It is significant that the very first printed music in which the word “madrigal” appeared in the title (Madrigali Novi, Rome 1530) featured a madrigal by Festa as its first work. Notable too is the ease with which Festa successively used diverse styles during the course of his career. As a composer and singer for the Papal Sistine Chapel, he of course wrote his masses, motets, magnificats and other religious works in a colourful counterpoint which showed evidence of his French-Flemish compositional background. His “other self ” however, the madrigal composer, reveals a Southern-inspired style. Thus, it may well be difficult for a listener to believe that all the compositions on this CD originated from the same pen! Costanzo Festa was born in the Turin area around 1490. Clearly, his post in the papal choir was the main focus of his life. From the time he joined the Chapel around 1517 to his death in 1545, he was active both as singer and composer (“in capella nostra cantor capellanus ac continuus commensalis”). In the posthumous printing of his Magnificat (Venice 1554) he was hailed as “già maestro della capella et musica di Roma”. Before he moved to Rome, there is evidence of Costanzo Festa's having lived in two places: first, on the island of Ischia where, in the service of Costanza d'Avalos, he gave music lessons to her two nephews; and afterwards in the circles of the French court, where he made the acquaintance of other masters such as Jean Mouton. His expressive counterpoint, his varied sound combinations, as well as his masterly canonic technique would certainly not have developed without this French influence. Two glorious compositions are a direct result of his stay in France. The first one, the funeral motet Quis dabit oculis was written at the death of Anne of Brittany, Louis XII's wife, on January 9, 1514. In its meditative character, this motet - a distinctive example of phrygian writing - did not go unnoticed among Festa's contemporaries. Indeed, the work - with an appropriately altered text - was performed on the death of Maximilian I of Austria in 1519, the work, however, being wrongly attributed to Ludwig Senfl. Louis XII died one year after his wife, and it can be assumed that Costanzo Festa wrote the five-voice motet Super flumina Babylonis for this occasion. By adding a requiem text in the tenor, the sad, biblical pictures evoked in this composition acquire greater depth. This work also made history: it is included in a magnilicent Italian musical manuscript prepared for Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. It was in Rome, however, that Costanzo Festa's ability as a composer developed to its full extent. In the Sistine Chapel, he was counted among the same musical elite as Arcadelt and Morales; Josquin Desprez was among his predecessors. Judging from the Vatican manuscripts, Festa was one of the most prolific composers to work there, along with Palestrina and Josquin. Festa's compositions of that time were of such similar quality to those of Josquin that the works of one were often mistaken for the works of the other. In his work Opus Merlini Cocai macaronicorum the Italian author Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544) stated that Festa's music was mistaken for that of Josquin from time to time: “...Festa Constans, Josquinus, qui saepe putabitur esse”. This shows once more how much Festa remained within the Josquin tradition in his early creative period. Compositions such as the funeral motet mentioned above confirm this. Costanzo Festa managed to separate himself from the influence of Josquin and Mouton's style fairly early in his career however. His six-voice motet Tribus miraculis is a beautiful example of his new, richly varied style. Not only does Festa increase the number of voices here: the imitation technique has become very complex and the counterpoint compact and most expressive, so that his style now reminds us more of Gombert than the earlier generation of composers. The work often changes its mood and sound colour. There is a completely different atmosphere expressed in the richly melismatic treatment of the words “Tribus miraculis” at the beginning of the work, compared with the dignified “aurum sicut regi magno” towards the end of the second part. The two sections from his mass Se congie pris provide yet more evidence of his rhythmic inventiveness and the pure virtuosity of his compositional style. In this mass for five voices, the melody of the French chanson is given to the tenor part. The counterpoint which Festa weaves around it is very nimble and leads to the conjecture that he must have had the services of the best singers. This work shows a completely different style from that of Quis dabit oculis! Festa's magnificats belonged to the standard repertoire of the Sistine Chapel. They achieved such fame that they were printed posthumously in Venice in 1554 at the instigation of the famous publisher Girolamo Scotto (Magnificat. Tutti gli otto toni a 4 voci composti da Constantio Festa). The Magnificat septimi toni bears witness to a notable aspect of Festa's magnificat writing; it is not set to music in the traditional manner. Whereas his contemporaries usually set the text alternatim (alternating between Gregorian chant and the use of multiple voices), in all of Festa's magnificat compositions the complete text is set to music polyphonically. Also conspicuous in Festa's writing is that every now and then he varies the number of voices from one verse to another. The verses of the magnificat on this CD are for between two and seven voices. Festa also had the habit of expanding the music in the last part into a kind of tour de force. In the Magnificat septimi toni the composer expands the number of voices to seven; the tenor part is the retrograde of the first cantus. The diversity in its voice variations, the inventiveness of its canonic and imitative technique, as well as the relentless variety of rhythms and harmonies, make this magnificat into an outstanding example of Festa's clear compositional style. Festa's fame as a composer spread through the distribution of his secular works. It is interesting to note that while his religious works have been passed down to us in manuscripts (the famous Vatican choir books), his secular compositions have reached us mainly in printed form. These secular works - mainly madrigals - have been printed and reprinted since the second decade of the sixteenth century. They occasionally appeared in combination with madrigals by other masters such as Arcadelt and Verdelot. This in fact makes Festa the first Italian to popularize the madrigal form. It is notable that the French writer Rabelais, in the prologue of the fourth volume of his Gargantua et Pantagruel (1552), mentioned Costanzo Festa as the only Italian to belong to the illustrious circle of composers alongside such names as Josquin, Brumel and Mouton. Festa's madrigals were published all over Europe (at Lyon, Louvain, Munich, Paris and elsewhere) until long after his death. The Italian Giacomo Vicenti included madrigals by Festa in his collections as late as 1591. In contrast to his church music, Festa used distinctly progressive elements in his secular works. He followed the intonation of each word meticulously. The imitative passages (as in the beginning of Constantia'l vo' pur dire) alternate with structured, homophonic declamations of text (as at the beginning of Madonna oymè). Although in this early stage of the art of madrigal writing there were not as yet any emotional, madrigalistic turns of phrase or chromaticisms è la De Rore, it can be distinctly felt how the composer manages to give musical form to the content and character of a text (for example in E' morta la speranza). Festa's madrigals are excellent examples of those qualities which made the madrigal so special from the very beginning: his contemporary, Verdelot, summed it up briefly: “They are light, heavy, gentle, compassionate, fast, slow, benign, angry or fleeting - depending on the properties of the words.” It remains a riddle how a composer so firmly based in counterpoint (in 1662 Zacconi wrote about a movement with a hundred and twenty simultaneous voices which Festa wrote around the theme La Spagna) could change his style so fundamentally within a lifetime - or indeed how he could manage to assimilate the contrapuntal style of the North with the madrigal style of the South. It is significant how highly Costanzo Festa was valued among those he worked with. Many of his compositions became part of the standard Sistine Chapel repertoire. His lamentations and his Te Deum belonged to the favourite works of the Vatican choir even after his death. The Sistine Chapel Diaries show, for example, that his Te Deum and his motets Lumen ad revelationem were performed as late as 1616. The Italian historian Giuseppe Baini (in his Memorie storica-critiche della vita e delle opere di Gíovanni Pierluigí da Palestrina, Rome 1828) noted that these works were even performed as late as 1826. Festa's contemporaries held him in high esteem. Pietro Aaron (in his Thoscanello de la Musica 1525) and Giovanni Maria Lanfranco (in his Le Scintille di Musica, 1533) counted him among the moderni and put him on the same level as Willaert. Printed editions by Silvestro Ganassi (1542), Fuenllana (1554) and even a Thuringian organ edition from the year 1639 contain arrangements of Festa's music. His Te Deum was printed, together with works by Lassus and Palestrina, as late as 1596. No less a person than the musician and publisher Claudio Merulo published an edition of his madrigals for three voices in 1568. His motet for three voices Quam palchm es provided the model for Claudio Monteverdi's motet of the same name. From 1535, the Sistine Diaries contain regular entries touching on Festa's health (“Constantius quaternarius; in quartariis; infirmus”); also during Pope Paul III's journey to Bologna, Festa was obliged to stay at home for health reasons (“impedimentum evidens”). It can be assumed that he was suffering from malaria, a widespread disease in Rome at that time. He died on April 10, 1545 and was buried with the highest honours on April 17. The Diaries report the following: “Eadem die itum fuit ad traspontinam: post missam in capella nostra celebratum: et ibi solemniter celebratae sunt exequiae domini Constantii Festae”. Our master composer left five masses, thirty hymns, around fifty motets, eight lamentations, eight magnificats, a Te Deum, a variety of smaller religious works and more than sixty secular compositions. It is now high time for the veil to be removed from this very significant milestone in the history of Italian music. Paul Van Nevel (Translation: © 1994 David Heitler)