The name Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802) means little to professional musicians or lovers of classical music, let alone general audiences. Despite his extraordinarily successful international career, Sarti is remembered nowadays solely through a handful of spicy anecdotes. Recently, the task of restoring Sarti and his works to the academic and artistic stage became possible due to an international research project entitled ‘Giuseppe Sarti: cosmopolitan composer in pre-revolutionary Europe’ (see www.udk-berlin.de/musikwissenschaft/sarti). As part of this project, on 3–4 March 2015 the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance hosted an international conference entitled ‘Giuseppe Sarti and late eighteenth-century Italian opera—from text to performance’, which explored Sarti’s contribution in the framework of Italian opera. This event was crowned by full-stage performances of Sarti’s Giulio Sabino by the Jerusalem Academy opera studio. The conference was organized in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di cultura, Tel-Aviv; the Einstein Stiftung/Universität der Künste, Berlin; the Musicology Department, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and the Israel Musicological Society. Prominent scholars from Israel, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States addressed such issues as the ethics and politics of opera-making in Sarti’s day, post-Metastasian paradigms of Italian opera and operas by Sarti, their dramaturgy and musical style, reception, editing and performance.