Though Verdi's fifth opera, Ernani (1844), by 1848 had established him in the United States as the likely successor to Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, and three others of his early operas, Nabucco, Lombardi, and Foscari had been heard, his first, Oberto, Conte di San Bonifacio (1839), did not achieve its U.S. premiere until 1978, a lag of 130 years. Considering how eager audiences were in the mid-nineteenth for “novelties,” including new operas, the long delay is surprising, and the cause lies partly in the opera's strangely truncated, early history.

Verdi had composed Oberto (as the opera commonly and hereafter is called), in the years 1836–38, but as a composer as yet unknown outside his town in the Po Valley, was unable to persuade any company to mount it until 1839, when the impresario at La Scala, Milan, took it to fill a hole in his spring schedule. After rehearsals began, singers fell ill, and the opera was rescheduled for the fall, with a different cast and some revisions and additions. Premiered on November 17, 1839, it had a substantial success, fourteen performances. The impresario then signed Verdi for three more operas, and the Milanese publisher Giovanni Ricordi, who had bought the rights to Oberto, began in December to sell individual numbers and to prepare complete piano and vocal scores. Meanwhile, beyond the Alps, in Paris, the Revue et Gazette musicale, published first a note that the opera had won “un grand et légitime succès” in Milan, then that the Parisian publisher Maurice Schlesinger soon would offer seven vocal excerpts for sale, and finally, a long, favorable review from its correspondent in Milan. In Leipzig, the Allgemeine Musikalishche Zeitung, in February 1840, published an even more detailed review, illustrating it with music to the Adagio of the opera's quartet, and concluding that the opera “had made the fortune of its author.”

More productions followed. In January 1840, a company in Turin staged the opera, and then, in October, La Scala revived it, with some further additions and revisions, for seventeen performances. The next year, Genoa and Naples produced it, and on February 1, 1842, in Barcelona, Spain, it became Verdi's first opera to play outside of Italy.