Unusually for a gala, the production was also strong: Videos by 59 Productions and Julian Crouch recreated memorable Met productions of the past, often starting with outlines or sketches and gradually filling them in with color to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, or lush life in the bird-dotted backdrop to Papageno’s aria from “The Magic Flute” (sung by Michael Volle).

And I hope that some of the video segments go viral after the show — particularly the interview with the 90-year-old soprano Leontyne Price, who opened the house in 1966 in the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” (“You just want to kiss yourself, you sound so good,” she said of her opening-night performance.) There were also the requisite beloved figures of the past: Plácido Domingo (who sang the baritone aria from “Andrea Chenier” as his first offering), James Morris and, of course, James Levine, the Met’s longtime music director, who conducted the last few numbers — all an important part of such an event, but also, as the evening reminded us, all figures who held on a little too long.

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Philip Kennicott: It’s hard to carry off a gala like this one. The producers need to give a good snapshot of the company as it is today, and enough of a sense of its past to evoke the requisite nostalgia. The actual anniversary being celebrated — the 50th birthday of the Met’s move to its current opera house at Lincoln Center — meant that this gala also had to evoke a sense of place. And they did a good job of it, recalling not just past productions but also architectural features of the Wallace Harrison-designed building, including its iconic five arches and some of the familiar textures of its deliberately ostentatious interior.

Architecture is destiny, and what was interesting to me were moments that connected the opera house as a building with its legacy as a place where opera is made. It actually wasn’t much bigger in terms of seats than the opera house it replaced, but it has a huge stage and (when it was built) a state-of-the-art backstage. It has rewarded designers who favor the spectacular, and singers who can fill its enormous auditorium. House favorites Dolora Zajick, who sang the Principessa di Bouillon’s aria from Adriana Lecouvreur, or Anna Netrebko demonstrated again why they have flourished here. Even more impressive, however, are singers like mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who can make the small gesture and delicate vocal passage carry in a hall this cavernous (as she did in an exquisite excerpt from Massenet’s “Werther”).

I wonder if tonight may be remembered also as a kind of symbolic passing of the torch. Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the music director designate, really began to take possession of the house this evening. Levine, who appeared both in historic videos from early in his career, and as a conductor at the end of the evening, built this house and its musical forces over decades as Met’s indefatigable leader. And his appearance last night brought the audience to its feet. But Nezet-Seguin proved himself a charismatic, versatile and skillful conductor, in a wide variety of repertoire. And his contributions — among them, the wonderfully mercurial accompaniment to Iago’s Credo from “Otello” — were a high point.

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Midgette: I agree about Nezet-Seguin, though when it most struck me was during Yoncheva’s aria in “La Boheme”: He, and the orchestra, were absolutely breathing with her. I didn’t find that Marco Armiliato, the evening’s other conductor, brought the same level of empathy and magic.

I should add that of course I found the gala had its longueurs, some created by last-minute singer cancellations; I’m not sure we needed two arias by Volle or Vittorio Grigolo, who got an extra outing when Juan Diego Florez canceled. And I found the ending, the Act II finale of Aida, to be trite, though some liked the images of beloved singers of the past that flashed by, blurry and at warp speed, on the backdrop.

What everyone will remember best, though, is the surprise first-half appearance of Dmitri Hvorostovsky, the beloved Siberian baritone, suffering from brain cancer, who looked thin and a little unsteady on his feet, but in “Cortigiani, vil razza” from Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” sounded every bit as magnificent as ever.

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As for the anniversary, it seemed personal to me; you and I are about the same age as the Met, and I felt I was watching a traversal of my own past. One thing that struck me is that the construction of the Met represented a kind of idealism we’re still seeing, a hope of art’s power to transform, but with a difference: When the Met was built in the 1960s, it was as a temple to art that was supposed to transform an inner city, not unlike the Kennedy Center, which opened five years later. Today, arts administrators are still hoping for art to transform, but the emphasis now is on moving out of the buildings, the sacred temples, into communities — the buzzword today is outreach. The projected stage images could be taken as a symbol of an idea of the arts as something less concrete, less tied to physical architecture, if you will.