The Metropolitan Opera didn’t mean to put on concert performances of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust” this winter. But the company can learn from its mistake.

When it announced its 2019-20 season last year, the Met had programmed a run of Robert Lepage’s video-filled “Damnation” production, which premiered in 2008 as a kind of trial for his “Ring” cycle, then on the horizon. But in June, because of “unanticipated technical demands,” seven staged Berlioz performances became four unstaged ones, through Feb. 8.

From its premiere, in 1846, its composer was resigned to this fantastical work — a “légende dramatique,” he called it, not quite an opera or an oratorio — being played in concert rather than in full production. The Met has tried it both ways over the years. Even if the audience on Saturday afternoon didn’t get Mr. Lepage’s “Hollywood Squares” grid of screens, the company’s enjoyable performance wasn’t untrue to Berlioz’s vision, or at least his expectations.