Verdi, like Shakespeare in our theater, is now so much a part of opera in the United States that we tend to forget that he was not always with us, not always popular, and that many of those hearing him for the first time in the late 1840s felt assaulted by his music. One outraged New York critic, reviewing the U.S. premiere of Ernani, wished to have cut on his tombstone, “he liked not verdi,” and a member of a later audience who kept a diary noted, Verdi “keeps up a ceaseless torrent of forcible-feeble emphasis, passion, and vehemence till one is weary of him as of an author who deals only in italics, large capitals, dashes and interjection marks.” Yet a critic in Philadelphia remarked, “His sustained style, intensely dramatic situations, grand finales and concerted pieces; altogether it was a new experience to us.” And in Boston another recorded that with Ernani “all recollections of English opera were effaced by this life-breathing, passionate, and effective performance, and from that hour a new ideal of excellence in operatic affairs became fixed and irrevocable.”

As the Bostonian implied, opera in the United States in the late 1840s, at least in our eastern seaboard cities, was undergoing a change. English opera, typically songs interspersed with dialogue and played by actors not singers, was slowly giving way to Italian opera, which required more musical skill. Not only were the Italian operas more heavily orchestrated, with larger choruses and more complicated music, arias for songs, sextets for duets, but often their finales continued unbroken by recitative or dialogue for ten minutes or more.

One city, New Orleans, was far ahead in this change. In 1847, the year in which the Italian Opera Company of Havana brought Ernani to the United States, New Orleans had the country's only resident opera company, the only theater devoted primarily to opera, the largest theater orchestra, and even, at times, a small ballet corps; and as early as 1829 had started what was probably the country's first, fairly regular, newspaper column of opera news, comment, and criticism.