Since my livelihood depends on my sitting for many long, silent hours in darkened concert halls, it’s an unfortunate aspect of my character that I hate keeping my opinions to myself — even long enough to write them down for the next day’s paper.

When a soprano’s voice blooms on a high C, I want to turn to the person next to me with a grin and say exactly what color the note reminds me of. When an orchestra enters unsteadily at the start of a piece, I want to raise an eyebrow at my colleague across the aisle. But for all the communal energy of live classical performances, they are fundamentally solitary events; shushing is still common, and to be honest, I do my fair share.

But as the classical field moved onto the internet, the experience everyone has long had with Super Bowl commercials and the Oscars became the experience I had with recitals, symphonies and operas: I chatted my way through them, in text chains that started with a message out of nowhere (“Are you WATCHING this?”) and flowed for hours from there.

When the Metropolitan Opera threw its globe-trotting, star-studded At-Home Gala on April 25, it was an unexpectedly immense relief to get to unspool my commentary in real time — without having to wait for intermission gossip sessions in the lobby, searching out acquaintances and dodging recklessly balanced plastic flutes of champagne.

My senses were newly sharpened, hypersensitive to every detail, every breath; in visual and aural close-up, all the notes magnified, things were more vivid than they are in person. What was strange was how, wanting to share my thoughts as constantly and precisely as possible, I began to have a little bit of, well, stage fright. “I’m as nervous about this gala as if I myself were performing lol,” my friend wrote.

We posted screenshots of conversations we were having with others. We praised. We dissed. (“And he’s not even in great voice,” I noted, about a tenor who shall remain nameless.) We watched history get revisited, as Renée Fleming sang Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” from “Otello,” a onetime standard of hers. “OK that knocked me out. Her emotion!!” my friend exclaimed.

His judgment on Matthew Polenzani’s sweet, very dad-like “Danny Boy”? “This is the most heterosexual thing that has ever happened.”

“They are,” my friend concluded of the whole shebang, “really pulling it off!”

Unplanned, shared streams of consciousness like this sprouted when the pianist Conrad Tao played Frederic Rzewski’s fiery variations on “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” in his apartment. (“I am a total fangirl,” a friend I hadn’t spoken to in months came out of the woodwork to write.) They came when the Met streamed a classic performance of “Ariadne auf Naxos,” during which I fielded several threads, for an overall sense of sitting around a cozy campfire warmed by the radiance of the starring soprano, Jessye Norman. When another pianist, Igor Levit, streamed Beethoven sonatas from an empty studio, I marveled to a colleague that the Twitter wags who like to dismiss his artistry were simply crazy. My phone kept lighting up, the music and the texting interwoven, and the art sweeter and livelier for it. The musicians weren’t opposite me on a stage; they were in the middle of a party.

It’s true: Classical music’s emphasis on solo attentiveness and rumination — which sets my professional life happily apart from much of contemporary society — was a little lost. Occasionally I felt like shushing myself. After this crisis is over, I certainly don’t ever want to be thumbing my phone during a “real” performance; just as the tumult of texts has been a respite from the silence and isolation of 2020, focus and solitude will go back to being a respite from the rest of normal life.

But I hope we all carry with us into a healthier future a renewed appreciation for the community that can form — with sublime spontaneity, and even virtually — around music. In an anxious year, that community was a precious resource. “Glad we got to share it together,” my friend texted after the Met’s gala. I answered truthfully: “What a blessing.”