PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Opera’s job is to show us what’s bigger, wilder and more intense than ordinary life. It’s a terrarium in which we watch a condensed version of ourselves, with more ecstatic loves and more savage suffering.

It’s no secret that a disproportionate amount of that suffering has been endured by women. With its bounty of female mad scenes, wasting sicknesses and tragic deaths, opera has been viewed with suspicion by some feminist critics. In a classic 1979 book, French theorist Catherine Clément observed that “on the opera stage, women perpetually sing their eternal undoing.”

“Glowing with tears, their décolleté cut to the heart,” Clément wrote, “they expose themselves to the gaze of those who come to take pleasure in their pretend agonies.”

Opera, in this reading, is the product of a male-dominated society that has both celebrated female beauty and limited female action: hence the virtuoso singing paired with the punishing downfalls. There’s a dark aspect to the fact that women losing their minds and their lives is clearly central to what bewitches so many of us about “La Traviata” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Elektra” and “La Bohème,” “Faust” and much else in the standard repertoire.

Not every opera, and certainly not every contemporary one, revolves around suffering women. But two major new works — Jeanine Tesori’s “Grounded,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season Monday, and Missy Mazzoli’s sly, poignant, darkly funny “The Listeners,” which had its U.S. premiere at Opera Philadelphia on Wednesday — are reminders that this fascination is strong enough to have lingered into our own time.

Neither of these works has a traditional opera heroine. Jess in “Grounded” is a fighter pilot (no décolleté for her) and Claire in “The Listeners” teaches high school. And unlike Carmen or Salome, they don’t die; these new operas end with their main characters in a position that can seem a lot like composure. But the main spectacle of both plots — the climactic meat of the action — remains the same as in “Lucia di Lammermoor”: a woman coming undone.

This points to perhaps the central challenge of making contemporary opera: the tension that arises from fitting old forms, structures and tropes to modern subject matter and mores. (And lots of expletives, which invariably made the audiences at the Met and in Philadelphia titter.) Grand opera is set up to push emotional boundaries, to work on a level of stylized extremity quite different from TV or movies, to show us people — often women — gone wild.

But does that feel over-the-top and silly to today’s creators and audiences? Though both these new operas put a woman in extremis front and center, neither is at its most persuasive portraying that distress. So the works end up in a kind of limbo: Not intense enough to fulfill the traditional expectations they raise, nor modern enough to jettison the old forms. The creeping sense that “Grounded” and “The Listeners” don’t quite deliver the fierceness they gesture toward is a symptom of how stuck this art form is between present and past.

In “Opera, or the Undoing of Women,” Clément wrote, “I have seen operas at work; if I am touched by them, it is because they speak of women and their misfortune.”

In “Grounded,” that misfortune is brought on by a new job: Jess (mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo), a swaggering F-16 pilot, is reassigned to joystick duty, operating a missile-bearing drone, and swiftly finds herself dissociating, her work and home lives collapsing into each other as her paranoia builds.

In “The Listeners,” the catalyst is a low but loud, ever-present hum that pushes Claire (soprano Nicole Heaston) toward madness — and toward the arms of a self-proclaimed philosopher who has been exploiting a group of people who can hear the noise.

Tesori gives us some churning orchestral passages to suggest Jess’ growing sense of alienation from her family. And she and her librettist, George Brant, have invented a character, Also Jess, to make super-explicit the protagonist’s mental split.

Mazzoli’s score, too, occasionally condenses into dense strength, but generally it suggests insanity by clever indirection (something like Gaetano Donizetti accompanying the mad scene in “Lucia” with a flickering flute). “The Listeners,” with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, avoids illustrating the unending hum, and even pulls in the opposite direction, offering ominously light twinkling underneath a character describing the sound as “a hard buzz, like the engine of a truck.”

The second act of “Grounded” opens with Jess at a mall, growing fearful of being surveilled by the security cameras surrounding her. We see that security footage from various angles, blown up and projected onstage, and D’Angelo’s eyes wide with fear. Yet we get little palpable sense of her desperation; the music remains resolutely mild-mannered throughout the score. And the over-obvious presence of Also Jess seems like protesting too much: There’s a need to see the character’s dissociation only because we don’t feel it.

And while the “Listeners” score is warm and ever-active, only briefly — when her students’ horseplay is broken into strange choral fragments and she bursts out in expletives — do you believe that a truly brutal depiction of Claire’s mental state is at hand. But the moment passes, as does a scarier glimpse into outsize emotions from Angela (the spookily bitter mezzo-soprano Rehanna Thelwell), the woman Claire callously supplants as their leader’s lover.

Mazzoli, Tesori and their librettists don’t appear to be merely playing with, or winking at, the tradition Clément describes. If you read the texts of these operas, you find extended mental descents and scenes of psychological breakdown — complete, in “The Listeners,” with coyote howls.

And yet when you watch and listen to both works, the extremity you’re prepared for ends up being more gestured at, referred to, than truly experienced. These pieces end up feeling a bit polite — a bit, well, sane — in situations that seem to be asking for more.

We don’t vividly feel the devastating downward spiral of Claire, a character who, in the course of the plot, loses her job, terrifies her family, kisses a student and succumbs to delusions of grandeur. Part of the problem is that Heaston, who sings the role with openhearted directness, simply doesn’t project hard-edged insomniac insanity, in voice or presence.

But she also doesn’t have hard-edged insomniac insanity to sing. (There was coolness, too, in Mazzoli and Vavrek’s previous presentation of female breakdown in “Breaking the Waves,” their 2016 opera based on Lars von Trier’s merciless film.) Mazzoli, like Tesori, suggests that she’s putting a contemporary spin on the tradition of sublimely singing, pathetically suffering prima donnas, but seems ambivalent about delivering.

Is it because delivering that would render Claire, or Jess in “Grounded,” too much of a victim, not empowered enough? Is it because it would seem too much, too earnest, for our irony-embracing culture? (Both operas keep leavening the darkness with jokes in a way that Puccini would find bizarre.)

A certain emptiness at the center of both works may well be a result of that central tension of making contemporary opera: trying to tell a new story in an old way. “I’m on the brink of losing my mind,” Claire sings. But we don’t believe her.

In neither “The Listeners” nor “Grounded” do we ever really feel like pushed into the dark, seductive depths that opera can unveil to us. We’re not even on the brink.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.