“It’s a game,” Mr. Sharon said. “But suddenly the game is deadly serious.”

The game of presenting a new production of “Die Zauberflöte” is deadly serious, indeed — especially in Germany, where the piece is particularly beloved and performed dozens of times annually in virtually all the country’s plethora of opera houses. Many families make annual pilgrimages to see the State Opera’s storybook 1994 “Zauberflöte,” directed by August Everding using sets and costumes based on 1816 designs by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. (Schinkel, a local hero, also designed many of the buildings surrounding the company’s theater.)

For this reason, the company’s new general manager, Mathias Schulz, decided to keep the old production in its repertory and run it alongside Mr. Sharon’s new one, which has been given a gloriously magical infusion of marionette theater and flying effects. The new staging opens Feb. 17 and runs through March 16, and the old one returns for four performances, with a different cast, at the end of April.

It’s as if the Metropolitan Opera were to offer a fresh staging of “La Bohème” and then trot out its classic Zeffirelli production a month later. While opera houses will sometimes keep old sets and costumes in storage in case a new production turns out to be a disaster, it is highly unusual for a new show to be introduced with the explicit understanding that it will be presented alongside its predecessor.

“With Schinkel there is a historic link that’s very important for this institution,” Mr. Schulz said in an interview. “At the same time, there is the possibility to show that different approaches and different concepts are valid.”