The Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik (Innsbruck Festival of Early Music) is an early music festival founded in 1976.

In the year 1963, to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Tyrolean apartenage to Austria, the Innsbruck musician Prof. Otto Ulf (1907–1993) presented the first Ambras Castle Concert, and every August since 1976 Innsbruck with its Festwochen has been a mecca for Early Music fans. Opera stars such as Jennifer Larmore

Jennifer Larmore

Jennifer Larmore is an American mezzo-soprano opera singer, noted for coloratura and bel canto.- Career :Jennifer Larmore is an American mezzo-soprano, well known for her versatility, natural beauty and stage craft...

 and the counter-tenor Derek Lee Ragin

Derek Lee Ragin

Derek Lee Ragin is an American countertenor.Ragin studied as a piano major at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. While at Oberlin he took secondary voice lessons with Richard Anderson. He began his operatic career at Oberlin in Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Oberon...

 have enthralled audiences, musicians such as Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall i Bernadet is a Catalan viol player, conductor and composer. He has been one of the major figures in the field of Western early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for bringing the viol back to life on the stage...

 and Sigiswald Kuijken

Sigiswald Kuijken

Sigiswald Kuijken is a Belgian violinist, violist, and conductor known for playing on authentic instruments.-Biography:Kuijken was born in Dilbeek, near Brussels. He was a member of the Alarius Ensemble of Brussels between 1964 and 1972 and formed La Petite Bande in 1972...

 have given spellbinding concerts in Innsbruck.

The festival takes place in venues including the Ambras Castle every August. From 1991 to 2009 René Jacobs organized the opera program, and from 1997 to 2009 Jacobs was artistic director of the whole festival. Operas included Pietro Antonio Cesti's L'Orontea and L'Argia, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is an opera in a prologue and five acts , set by Claudio Monteverdi to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. The opera was first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1639–1640 carnival season...

, L'incoronazione di Poppea

L'incoronazione di Poppea

L'incoronazione di Poppea is an Italian baroque opera comprising a prologue and three acts, first performed in Venice during the 1642–43 carnival season. The music, attributed to Claudio Monteverdi, is a setting of a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello...

, Francesco Cavalli

Francesco Cavalli

Francesco Cavalli was an Italian composer of the early Baroque period. His real name was Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni, but he is better known by that of Cavalli, the name of his patron Federico Cavalli, a Venetian nobleman.-Life:Cavalli was born at Crema, Lombardy...

's Giasone

Giasone

Giasone is an opera in three acts and a prologue with music by Francesco Cavalli and a libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini. It was premiered at the Teatro San Cassiano, Venice on 5 January 1649, during carnival. Giasone was "the single most popular opera of the 17th century"...

, Serse

Serse

Serse is an opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel. It was first performed in London on 15 April 1738. The Italian libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from that by Silvio Stampiglia for an earlier opera of the same name by Giovanni Bononcini in 1694...

, Francesco Conti

Francesco Conti

Francesco Conti was an Italian artist.Conti was born in Florence, Italy, and spent some time studying art in Rome. He specialized in painting religious-themed works. He studied primarily under Giovanni Maria Morandi and Carlo Maratta. In 1738 he painted one of his most renown works Madonna and...

's Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena, Antonio Sartorio

Antonio Sartorio

Antonio Sartorio was an Italian composer active mainly in Italy and in Hamburg, Germany. He was a leading composer of operas in his native Venice in the 1660s and 1670s and was also known for composing in other genres of vocal music...

's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, Handel's Flavio

Flavio

Flavio, re de' Longobardi is an opera in three acts by George Frideric Handel. The Italian-language libretto was by Nicola Francesco Haym, after Matteo Noris's Il Flavio Cuniberto. It was Handel's fourth full-length opera for the Royal Academy of Music...

, Rinaldo

Rinaldo

Rinaldo may refer to:*Rinaldo , an Italian opera by George Frideric Handel*Rinaldo , a cantata by Johannes Brahms*Rinaldo , a character in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered...

, Telemann's Orpheus

Orpheus

Orpheus was a legendary musician, poet, and prophet in ancient Greek religion and myth. The major stories about him are centered on his ability to charm all living things and even stones with his music; his attempt to retrieve his wife from the underworld; and his death at the hands of those who...

, Johann Adolf Hasse's Solimano, Haydn Il mondo della luna

Il mondo della luna

Il mondo della luna , Hob. 28/7, is an opera buffa by Joseph Haydn with a libretto by Carlo Goldoni, first performed at Eszterháza, Hungary on 3 August 1777. Goldoni's libretto had previously been set by four other composers, first by the composer Baldassare Galuppi and performed in Venice in the...

, Mozart's La finta semplice

La finta semplice

La finta semplice , K. 51 is an opera buffa in three acts for soloists and orchestra, composed in 1769 by then 12-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by the court poet Marco Coltellini based on an early work by Carlo Goldoni...

 Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787...

and Florian Leopold Gassmann

Florian Leopold Gassmann

Florian Leopold Gassmann was a German-speaking Bohemian opera composer of the transitional period between the baroque and classical eras. He was one of the principal composers of dramma giocoso immediately before Mozart....

's L'opera seria.

Among the conductors making appearances are Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Nikolaus Harnoncourt is an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music from the Classical era and earlier. Starting out as a classical cellist, he founded his own period instrument ensemble in the 1950s, and became a pioneer of the Early Music movement...

, Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall

Jordi Savall i Bernadet is a Catalan viol player, conductor and composer. He has been one of the major figures in the field of Western early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for bringing the viol back to life on the stage...

, Sigiswald Kuijken

Sigiswald Kuijken

Sigiswald Kuijken is a Belgian violinist, violist, and conductor known for playing on authentic instruments.-Biography:Kuijken was born in Dilbeek, near Brussels. He was a member of the Alarius Ensemble of Brussels between 1964 and 1972 and formed La Petite Bande in 1972...

, John Eliot Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner CBE FKC is an English conductor. He founded the Monteverdi Choir , the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique...

 and Alan Curtis

Alan Curtis (harpsichordist)

Alan Curtis is a noted American harpsichordist, musicologist, and conductor of baroque opera. After graduate studies at the University of Illinois , where he wrote his dissertation on the keyboard music of Sweelinck, he studied in Amsterdam with Gustav Leonhardt, with whom he subsequently recorded...

.

Since 2010, Alessandro De Marchi

Alessandro De Marchi

Alessandro De Marchi is an Italian conductor, best known for his interpretation of baroque oratorios and operas, as leader of the Academia Montis Regalis orchestra, and director of the orchestra's foundation in Mondovì, Mons Regalis, one of the oldest towns of Piedmont. He was a student of the...

, has succeeded Jacobs.