For a long time, people went to the Metropolitan Opera for the horses.

They looked to the Met, the country’s largest performing arts institution, for the kind of gaudily realistic splendor that popped even from the nosebleed seats: huge sets rising and falling, cast-of-thousands crowd scenes, and, yes, live animals.

Over the past quarter-century, most of those aging dog and pony shows of the 1980s and ’90s have been replaced. With the Met now facing grim financial troubles, those replacements have tended to be cheaper, with fewer and less bulky sets. They’ve often been updated, like a “Lucia di Lammermoor” in a trashy postindustrial America and “Rigoletto” in Rat Pack Las Vegas. The onstage menagerie has been vanishing.

On Tuesday, the company rang in the new year with a new version of Verdi’s Pharaonic classic “Aida” starring the shining soprano Angel Blue, 36 years since the premiere of the chariot-dotted last one. The sets have been streamlined; an intermission has been snipped. There was not a horse in sight.

The director is Michael Mayer, a Broadway veteran whose work at the Met includes that neon-drenched Vegas “Rigoletto” as well as a “La Traviata” in preposterous Disney princess crinolines. His “Aida,” which has some 65,000 seats to sell this season alone, has the carefully strategic feel of some presidential campaigns, desperate not to lose its base while trying to appeal to new voters with a veneer of freshness.

So, during Verdi’s delicate prelude, down from the flies rappels a modern-day archaeologist in an Indiana Jones fedora. He gazes around the looming, dimly lit interior of an ancient Egyptian temple, dusts off an object he finds on the ground, and holds it up to a shaft of light. Suddenly the walls fill in with richly colored hieroglyphs and the action of “Aida” can begin.

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The event was conceived to celebrate Jessie Fauset, the novelist, poet and literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., who had just published a new novel, “There Is Confusion.” But it wasn’t Fauset who captivated the crowd with a reading. Nor was it W.E.B. Du Bois, the éminence grise at the event, who capped the evening with a reading.

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