It did make aware that the libretto does contain so many refernces to hunger and longing for food and really showed perhaps more-than-implicit anti-Semitism in the text. (Humperdinck, like Wagner, shared similar views in the area.) I started thinking of the blood libel. And when that corpse came out of the oven and the crowd started getting to feast on it, I felt like were getting into not just Freud’s fictitious primal horde but also the more anthropologically accurate Girardian scapegoat mechanism. Guess who is the scapegoat in this staging?