The proceedings contain papers from the 3rd year of conferences on Italian operas in Bohemia in the 18th century, organized by the Cabinet of Music History of the EÚ AV ČR, the Center for Baroque Culture in Český Krumlov, and the Mozart Society, in connection with the modern premiere of the Prague opera by Antonio Boroni (1738?1792) from 1768, based on the theme of the Carthaginian queen Dido. The conference took place on September 16-17, 2017, under the title Didone as an Opera Inspiration in Český Krumlov. Reinhard Strohm (University of Oxford and Vienna) opened it with a paper on rituals and their secularized forms in opera scenes, Manfred Hermann Schmid (University of Tübingen and Munich) compared the musical setting of Dido's final suicide scene in various 18th-century operas. Andrea Chegai (La Sapienza University in Rome) analyzed the nuances in the different portrayals of the Carthaginian queen's personality in Italian operatic works from 1726 to 1749, and Antonella D’Ovidio (University of Florence) focused on the musical setting of Dido by Niccolò Jommelli. T. Volek confronted the contradictory relationship between the aesthetic norm of the operatic genre dramma per musica and the requirement for a happy ending ('lieto fine') of the musical story. M. Jonášová reported on Boroni's Dido, particularly on the aria Ah non…
