Review: For 9/11 Tribute, the Met Opera Returns Home

The company’s first performance inside its theater since March 2020 was an inspired rendition of Verdi’s Requiem.

What it meant to be in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday evening — for the first indoor performance there since March 2020 — was clear even before the music began. The theater’s doors had been closed to listeners for 18 months, almost to the day. After standing on lines that extended out into the Lincoln Center plaza and showing proof of vaccination, it felt almost unreal to me to be back in the gilded auditorium for Verdi’s Requiem, the company’s commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. As the audience entered, the orchestra musicians were already seated onstage. Then the members of the chorus, wearing face masks, started filing onto the raised rows of seats behind the players.