The project is concerned with the relationship between the expression and the transference of emotion in 19th-century Italian and French opera. The focus of the project is at the same time the relation of the planned (strategies, notations, and instructions for the presentation and evocation of emotion within a setting of cultural codes and regulations) and the unplanned (situation in performance) in the scene of emotional transference, the interaction of the aural (voice) and visual possibilities (gesture) of the singers/performers; as well as the alternating influence of theoretical disputes over the term "affect", the physiological/medical knowledge of the body, and the scope of 19th-century opera performance.

The project addresses the research fields B and D of the Cluster by taking this artistic system (opera) into account, which prominently participates in the transformations of shaping emotion, codetermining it; and can be regarded within artistic scenarios as the preferred and most effective place for the 19th century's culture of emotion.