It may be about cannibalism, but the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” which opens on Christmas Eve, will not give children sleepless nights, at least according to its director, Richard Jones . “Hansel and Gretel” has a unique place in the operatic repertoire. It is one of many fairy-tale based operas from the late 19th century, yet one of the few to endure. Because of its relative brevity and the popularity of its subject, it emerged over the years as a work singularly suitable for family entertainment. For many, it supplied the occasion for their first trip to the opera house, and, accordingly, it acquired a reputation as a “children’s opera.”

But the conductor of the Metropolitan’s new staging, Vladimir Jurowski, who makes a welcome return to the company after an absence of three seasons, sees this as an improper designation, simply because such a genre “didn’t really exist yet,” he said. “It came later, as an invention of Soviet composers,” the Russian-born conductor said. “Operas like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ are based on children’s subjects, but they have a seriousness and depth of treatment common to any good opera.”

For Mr. Jurowski, this helps to explain the score’s considerable appeal. “Humperdinck could have composed a singspiel” — a simple work with individual songs and ensembles — “but he wrote a through-composed piece in the manner of Wagner. You can hear a lot of late Wagner in it — ‘Parsifal,’ the ‘Ring,’ and especially ‘Meistersinger’ — but it also draws on the earlier German Romantic opera of Weber, especially in depicting the forest. And there is also an Eastern European influence in its Bohemian and Hungarian rhythms and tunes, which convey a sense of the foreign and the unknown.”

For Messrs. Jurowski and Jones, the new production represents something of a reunion. “Hansel and Gretel” was the first opera on which they collaborated, for a Welsh National Opera production nine years ago, later seen at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

More recently, they have worked together on “Wozzeck,” “Macbeth,” and “The Queen of Spades.” Each claims to learn from the other in a cross-fertilization of musical and dramatic ideas. “Thanks to Richard, I have come to understand that the music can’t be separated from what’s going on onstage,” Mr. Jurowski said.

“Vladimir is very exceptionally theatrically literate,” Mr. Jones said. “His father is a conductor and his mother was a dancer, so the genes are absolutely right.”

The new production will be sung in English in a translation by the director David Pountney, which he prepared for a production of his own. Mr. Jurowski sees this as a distinct advantage. “The text is the opera’s weakest point,” he said. “The translation is actually more truthful [than the original] to the spirit of the music,” which Mr. Jurowski regards as having a “dark and scary” side corresponding to elements of the Grimm version suppressed in Adelheid’s saccharine libretto.

So, should the witch be treated as a serious, threatening character in lieu of the usual comical figure? “She is really both,” Mr. Jones said, “comic in her self-delusion but scary because of her cannibalism,” as reflected by the baking and eating of children. His production builds on the hunger-cannibalism duality by setting each of the opera’s three acts in a different type of kitchen.

The witch is characterized musically, Mr Jurowski pointed out, by the language of operetta. Wagner would not have liked the idea of corrupting a music drama with such narrative, he said. “But precisely because operetta is thus seen as a kind of evil, it becomes a charming means to express the evil nature of the witch. Her death is laughable and serious at the same time.”

Is there a danger that the production will prove too sophisticated for children? “Children will appreciate it for what it is,” Mr. Jurowski said, “grown-ups are the ones more likely to have problems — if they look simply for satisfaction of a personal nostalgia for the past, if they want to reduce Christmas to Christmas presents and gingerbread.”