During a break in a recent technical rehearsal for the new production of “Tristan und Isolde” that will open the season on Sept. 26, Jeff Mace, who oversaw the chandelier project, showed off the new winches up in the domes, more than 85 feet above the orchestra seats. The winches, which look a little like industrial-strength rowing machines, unspool two lines of steel wire and a suitably red power cable to each sputnik. While the old machines could lift 150 pounds at a speed of one foot per second, the new ones can lift 500 pounds and go three times as fast.

Image Cables and an electrical cord attached to one of the chandeliers. Credit... Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

Now the sputniks are ready to resume their nightly ascents, and the Met, which has been facing a box-office slump and fiscal challenges, can take its place once more among the many opera houses that have made opulent, ornate chandeliers showpieces in their own right. The cult of the opera house chandelier, which dates back to the candle era, spans far and wide: They can be emblems of elegance, or visual manifestations of the dazzling, over-the-top art form that is opera, or acoustical aids that help reflect sound in large theaters that still shun electronic amplification. Chandeliers have even become symbols of opera to many people who have never heard an aria, thanks to the showstopping role that a crashing one plays in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The Met is not the only opera house that adds a dash of show business to the act of turning out the lights. At the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, the central Art Deco chandelier — adopted as the logo of the San Francisco Opera — goes out in an elaborate counterclockwise spiral. And before performances at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas, which opened in 2009, the 318 acrylic light rods that make up its chandelier ascend into the ceiling in a way that suggests a slow-motion meteor shower, to a recording of “The Light,” by Philip Glass.

Antoine Pecqueur, who wrote “The Most Beautiful Opera Houses in the World,” featuring photographs by Guillaume de Laubier, said the role of chandeliers had changed over the years, from illuminating high society’s see-and-be-seen rituals to serving a more functional, transitional role today. “We pass from the lighting in the hall to that of the stage,” he wrote in an email.