Nicolò Stamegna

Nicolò Stamegna, also cited as Stamigna or Nicolaus, was an Italian priest and composer born around 1615 in Spello, near Perugia, and who died in Loreto on 13 September 1685. His career unfolded almost entirely within the Papal States, where he held posts linked to church music, and his sacred output stands as evidence of the transition between the early concertato motet and the sacred cantata.

His career begins in 1635, when he was maestro di cappella at the cathedral of Spoleto until 1638; a similar post at Fabriano is later attributed to him, although this detail comes from Pitoni. In 1639 he was appointed organist of the collegiate church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Spello, but he had already left the post by early September of that same year. He subsequently directed the cathedral choir at Orvieto until 1658 and, according to Pomponi, in Perugia as well. In January 1659 he joined Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and later moved to San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, where he remained from 1667 to 1684. In 1682 he obtained an ecclesiastical benefice in Spello. He spent the final years of his life at the Holy House of Loreto, to which he arrived in July 1684.

Sources also credit Stamegna with work in Rome at the chapel of the Gesù and at the Roman Seminary from 1665, but this information is doubtful and may stem from a misreading of Gaspari. His legacy includes the Sacrae modulationes of 1637, close in style to the concertato motet, the Sacri concentus of 1670, closer to the sacred cantata, and a new edition of Guidetti's Directorium chori, adapted to the changes in the Roman breviary. His surviving output, considerable in scope but incomplete, establishes him as a significant figure in seventeenth-century Roman sacred music.