 Soon after, the original version received its American premiere, and first recording, at the 1999 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, under Julius Rudel.Music critic for "The Wall Street Journal", Heidi Waleson, wrote of the opera, in a review the Spoleto Festival production, that "Die Bürgschaft" is "a stunning work that knits together Weill's intense social and political concerns with compositional skill and invention of the highest order.