For the programme book of a Frankfurt production in the 1952/53 season, Theodor W. Adorno wrote a very short contribution entitled ‘Homage to Zerlina’, which has since become one of the classic texts on Mozart's Don Giovanni. Read with today's eyes, this declaration of love to the peasant girl is also characterised by some benevolently paternalistic formulations. However, Adorno's intention was to celebrate Zerlina as a symbol of reconciliation and freedom, as a personality between ‘rococo and revolution’, in whom ‘the unspeakable, which sounds with its silver voice from the no-man's-land between the battling epochs’, made itself heard. Zerlina should not be confused with a country innocence, as Don Giovanni was able to awaken in her a lust that he himself could no longer enjoy.

Adorno's later exegetes, who filled many pages with their interpretations of this essayistic miniature, referred above all to the philosopher's idea of the aesthetics of the moment, which is articulated in Zerlina as a ‘parable of history at a standstill’, the anticipation of a utopian state, and emphasised that Adorno's Zerlina was by no means identical to Mozart's Zerlina. That may well be true. And yet Adorno used this role, which he himself described as an ‘episodic character’, to capture something of the spirit and the special nature not only of Zerlina, but of all the female characters in Don Giovanni: that they do not fit into any of the usual role schemes of 18th-century opera, that their fascination stems from the ambivalence of their feelings and sensitivities and that they are not a part of the opera and that Mozart succeeds in making this constant struggle between morality and temptation audible in his music.