When the curtain rises on September 26, opening night of the 50th-anniversary season of the Metropolitan Opera, its "sputnik" chandeliers will be aglow.

This hasn't always been the case. The chandeliers have been used irregularly for several years: Technical difficulties left them stuck in position near the ceiling for all of last season, and in 2008, they had to be dismantled and sent to Europe for cleaning, reports Bloomberg Pursuits.

This summer, however, the Met has replaced the equipment that raises and lowers the chandeliers, custom-dying the new power cables "Met red." In other words, the chandeliers are back in business.

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Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera

More good news: If you love the aesthetic of the chandeliers, the Met Opera's shop is now selling replicas of the lights, ranging from $19,000 to $83,000. That's a gift shop souvenir we can get behind.

Chandeliers have had a special place in the opera throughout history. In the 18th century, the Opéra Royal at Versailles used mirrors to magnify its chandeliers, and when a chandelier fell at the Palais Garnier in Paris, it inspired a now-infamous scene in Gaston Leroux's novel, "The Phantom of the Opera," according to The New York Times.

In the Met Opera's case, 23 chandeliers designed by Hans Harald Rath were donated to the United States by the Austrian government in 1966 as a "thanks!" for implementing the Marshall Plan (the United States' more than $12 billion pledge to help stabilize the economy in Western Europe after World War II).

Now that's a beautiful history.

h/t: Bloomberg Pursuits