Stefano Felis

Stefano de Maza Gatto also known as Stefano Felis (baptised in Bari on 20 January 1538; 25 September 1603), was a Neapolitan Italian composer of the Renaissance, and the collaborator and probable teacher of composer Pomponio Nenna. He composed madrigals, sacred motets, and choral settings of the Mass.

Felis was born in Bari, in the province of Apulia of the Kingdom of Naples, where he became a canon at Santa Nicola. He later became Maestro di Cappella of the cathedral in Naples.

He accompanied the papal nuncio, Antonio Puteo, on a journey to the court of Rudolph II in Prague during the 1580s. It was in Prague that his first book of masses was published in 1588 by the printer Jiri Nigrin, and Felis later remarked upon his stay in Prague in the preface to his Sixth Book of Madrigals, published in Venice in 1591.

As an educator, Felis seems to have had a profound effect on the succeeding generation of musicians; Carlo Gesualdo, Giovan Battista Pace, Giovan Donato Vopa, and Pomponio Nenna are counted among his pupils.

In Pomponio Nenna’s first published collection of madrigals, Il Primo Libro de madrigali à cinque voci, (c. 1603), there appear several madrigals by Felis. As a teacher, Felis might have allowed the young Nenna to add these works to his pupil’s first publication, thereby ensuring its success.

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