Die Brautwahl opened at Hamburg's Stadtheater April 13, 1912, to run but four performances. In the heyday of verismo, a considerable contingent of German critics came to be disconcerted by Busoni's E. T. A. Hoffmann spinoff with its aura of the bizarre, grotesque, and supernatural. The Hamburger Nachrichten's critic took Busoni tongue-in-cheek to task—"... and this is supposed to be an Italian? Where are the arias, where are the melodies rolled in schmalz and butter which an Italian opera composer is surely bound by an unwritten rule to write?" The arias, duets, and ensemble numbers are there, though their barbed characterization and cool luminosity are not of the tear-jerking sort. Moreover, they are sandwiched between music cast in instrumental forms, anticipating postwar developments (e.g., Berg's Wozzeck). Busoni made this strategy explicit in the essay "The Essence and Oneness of Music" in 1921—"I should like to establish the fact that the opera as a musical composition always consisted in a series of short, concise pieces and that it will never be able to exist in any other form... It is... not by accident that separate numbers can be taken from the... Ring and used in the concert hall—Waldweben, Walkürenritt, Feuerzauber, and so on." Knowing that he had put some of his best music into Die Brautwahl—Bernard van Dieren calls it "a score to be savoured bar by bar"—when Busoni extracted a suite from it in August 1912 his frank organization by separate "numbers" made the task both simple and revelatory, its five movements reflecting the opera's richness. The first, Ghostly, movement, engulfs the listener in Die Brautwahl's aura of fantastication. The Lyric movement gathers the love duet, spread over three acts in the opera, into an extended piece in which the emotions of the protagonists are given a compelling conspectus but from an objective, or coolly mature, standpoint. Albertine's equinoctial apparition—transcribed for piano as Erscheinung, the sixth of the Elegies (1907)—is the heart of the Mystic movement. The Hebrew movement depicts Manasse, the evil magician, and his duel with Leonhard (whom Busoni identified with Liszt), the hero's magical mentor. Busoni thought well enough of it that he transcribed the fracas for piano as the first movement of his Toccata (1920) and also arranged it as a concert aria (1923). A final brief Cheerful movement brings the work to a manic close. The Suite was premiered by Oskar Fried and the Berlin Philharmonic, January 3, 1913.

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