Opera Philadelphia’s new ‘Madame Butterfly’ set out to be great music and transcend harmful stereotypes. Does it succeed?

If you think it’s the job of art to remedy racist tropes or right social-justice wrongs, you might be disappointed in Opera Philadelphia’s production of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly at the Academy of Music.

It’s not that there aren’t any correctives in this new take by director Ethan Heard and production designer Yuki Izumihara that, in an opera company blurb, “illuminates and ultimately transcends harmful [Asian] stereotypes, empowering the protagonist Cio Cio San with new choices for her future.”

The problem is that the correctives feel like superficial touches and afterthoughts next to the still-overwhelmingly devastating story. When all is sung and done, this visually bare-bones Butterfly still comes across as the story of a wily and insincere American serviceman who draws a vulnerable 15-year-old Japanese bride into marriage, tosses her aside, and leaves human wreckage in his wake.

I wish the production’s final gesture (more about that in a moment) in which Cio Cio San rises above her usual depiction as a submissive victim was strong enough to erase all of the pain and humiliation she endures in the rest of the opera. But it wasn’t enough, especially not next to all of the emotion Puccini’s score has been telling you to feel for the previous two hours.

Why present Madame Butterfly at all? One reason is opera companies are looking to survive, and it’s highly inconvenient that, of the six or eight opera titles at this point popular enough to fill the house, one of them happens to be a piece whose music has aged considerably better than its book.

The other reason is just as important and not unrelated to the first: the score. Yes, some of Puccini’s interpretations of Asian music are sometimes awkward and cringey. But the piece, especially Act II and III, is not only gorgeous, but built on astute musical-theatrical synergies. When Cio Cio San, our Butterfly, presages her tragic fate, the orchestral response is so foreboding it gives you a sick feeling in your stomach.

The orchestra, in fact, is one of the best reasons to catch this production, which I heard Sunday afternoon. Conductor Corrado Rovaris had total buy-in from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra for his nuanced and deeply moving sense of phrasing and pacing.

It’s a shame this production doesn’t allow for total focus on the orchestra in the big six- or seven-minute “Intermezzo,” where listening time was accompanied by a series of projections of pioneers in women’s social justice. This was heavy-handed, even if many of the accompanying quotes were beautiful.

But the historical images of women who have played the role of Butterfly flickering by with the “humming chorus” made for a sensitively constructed sequence of visuals and sound, particularly with a smooth-as-silk Opera Philadelphia Chorus.

In addition to Rovaris and the orchestra, the other thing girding this production is soprano Karen Chia-ling Ho as Cio Cio San. The principal-role singers varied in strength — tenor Anthony Ciaramitaro as an adequate Pinkerton, baritone Anthony Clark Evans as an excellent, rich-voiced Sharpless, and Kristen Choi singing a Suzuki so fully realized emotionally in her finely hewn mezzo, that it cried out for a lead role sometime, somewhere.

But Ho is a magnificent Butterfly. Her “Un bel dì” soared, and in the course of her performance she created a fully realized arc from submissive girl to woman, if not empowered, then at least world-weary.

That transformation was a vocal one, and it was more effective than the production’s central visual device of a small puppet. The creative team split Cio Cio San in two — her spirit, sung by Ho who, in black garb, shadowed a puppet meant to signify the character herself. That last gesture in the opera has Ho — alive and somehow having suffered a different fate — reaching out and embracing her child, with the visuals cleared to reveal a naked backstage Academy of Music.

“While the Spirit initially wants to fulfill Pinkerton’s fantasy, she eventually awakens to the damaging role she is being asked to play,” said director Heard in a news release explaining the production.

Perception is reality, and perhaps the real-time alternative narrative was obvious to and deeply felt by some listeners. It’s hard for a white, lifelong operagoer like me to know what significance a treatment like this holds to an Asian listener. My own immediate family is fully half Asian, with Korean American and Japanese American siblings and two Vietnamese American children, and I wouldn’t presume to know how meaningful this production might be to any of them.

All of which makes me wonder whether it’s time to put this piece on the shelf, at least for a while. Maybe Madame Butterfly best exists in recordings, where you can soak in the incredible music and the imagination is free to invent any story, or none at all.

Opera Philadelphia’s “Madame Butterfly” continues May 3 at 8 p.m. and May 5 at 2 p.m. at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Sts. Tickets are $25-$309. operaphila.org, 215-732-8400.