In the 1980s I was the 30-something manager of the legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz, arguably the greatest concert pianist in history. Mr. Horowitz was bored by practicing, but lived for his public performances, when the various demons with which he was plagued permitted him to leave the confines of his Upper East Side townhouse.

Mr. Horowitz took juvenile pleasure in referring to intermissions as “interpissions” and would command me to surreptitiously surveil the audience in the lobby during the interval to hear what they were saying about him and report back. He needed to know, since his performances were fueled by the audiences’ frenzied response to his virtuosity, as well as by the natural acoustics of the concert halls that provided him with instant audio feedback. (Although he once, cynically, told me, “Check good, acoustics good.”)

He was fond of quoting from Mozart’s letters, ripped pages that he would stuff into the inside of his elegant smoking jacket and pluck out over his nightly dinners of Dover sole — the only main course he would eat, for fear of indigestion. It turns out that Mozart was obsessed with audience reaction to his performances, too. In one of Mozart’s letters to his father, he wrote: “In the midst of the first allegro came a passage I had known would please. The audience was quite carried away. There was a great outburst of applause.” He went on, “I knew when I wrote it that it would make a sensation.” Mr. Horowitz found a soul mate in Mozart, whom he decreed would not have been a composer without a public to win over. I think he may have been right.

On March 16, a few days after I had to announce the premature ending of the Metropolitan Opera season, the 135th in its illustrious history, instead of performing we began streaming a different, prerecorded opera every night free. The initiative has been an undeniable success. After 12 days, we racked up an astounding 100 million viewing minutes as opera lovers on lockdown around the world reveled in the soprano Deborah Voigt’s heroic exploits as Brünnhilde to redeem the world in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle and enjoyed the rest of the operatic pantheon from Puccini to Strauss. Other opera and theater companies have since joined us in opening up their libraries; homebound performers like the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato are resourcefully offering their own live solo streams. This migration to online isn’t restricted to opera and theater; it’s also happening in the realms of pop, world music and hip-hop.