This series of unstaged performances of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust was an accident – they were meant to be seven fully-staged performances. But what a happy accident, and what the Met could learn from the experience: “Rameau, Lully, Vivaldi: The glory of early music could finally ring at the Met without the pressure and expense of full stagings. Ditto Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, a late-20th-century classic still unheard in this city.” – The New York Times