Our perception of music being multi-sensory, we wonder about the space arising between the musical work and the listener, which can be defined as a kind of responsive membrane or skin. We may have detected that space in the peculiar way music, text and staging interact in opera, thus both addressing our senses and acting upon our memory.We will first define the sensitive sense of art and music, then demonstrate how such a sensitive or responsive approach is at the core of contemporary lyrical creations such as Philippe Boesmans’, Peter Eötvös’, Kajia Saariaho’s and Ana Sokolović’s operas, and most notably in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin.Created in 2012, this opera was inspired by the medieval legend of the Eaten Heart. Martin Crimp, author of the text of Written on Skin, imagines three contemporary angels bringing back to life a wealthy landlord and his wife Agnès. One of the angels becomes an illuminator: he gets himself settled at the landlord’s to work on a book which will be written on the skin. Agnès is interested in it ... Text and music bring into play a real living organic system that interferes with the senses and mobilizes one’s memory. As in any relational history, it is about desire, the one that gets written on our skin.