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Moments later, as he keeled over while Charlotte's daughter sails through the presto agitato section of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," I resented being proven correct.

As the author Johanna Fiedler recounted in “Molto Agitato,” a history of the Met, Mr. Levine’s detractors considered the gala an unseemly act of self-celebration.

Over a soundtrack of percussion and agitato strings, it opened with three title cards: “Government Funded Data Mining and Surveillance,” “Psychological Warfare,” and “Abusive Government Shakedown.”

The singer, as noted, was a species of turbo ventriloquist; the guitarist, the brainiac, drove the thing forward with massive, slashing chords; and the rhythm section was composed of two uncontrollable soloists: the prolific John Entwistle, whose bass offered arch intra-musical commentary at heavy metal volume, endlessly raising its eyebrows and doodling in the margins, and on drums the feast of acceleration, the rampage of allegro agitato, that was Keith Moon, stampeding ahead of his tics like a character in a fairy tale.

Johanna Fiedler, a former press representative for the Met, wrote in her 2001 book “Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera,” that such stories had circulated since at least 1979.