In the performance history of Verdi's operas in the United States, Luisa Miller, his fifteenth, has two claims to uniqueness: It is the only one of his thirty-two operas (counting six revisions as new works) to have had its premiere in Philadelphia, and the only one to have had its first production sung in English. Moreover, another singularity: The Walnut Street Theatre, in which the opera was first heard, is the oldest in the English-speaking world continually in use, and the only site of a nineteenth-century Verdi premiere in the United States still in use. Though its interior has been altered, chiefly by a cantilevered balcony replacing two tiers of wall-clinging boxes, the relatively small space enclosed (capacity 1,088) can still suggest how it might have looked under gaslight on October 27, 1852.

The moving spirit behind the premiere was a soprano, Caroline Richings (1827–82), who, though born in England, was brought as a child to the United States by parents who soon died, and then she was adopted by their friend, the bachelor actor-singer-manager, Peter Richings. Though he, too, had been born in England, beginning in 1821, he made his career in the United States, chiefly in New York and Philadelphia, and in 1852, he began to tour in plays and operas with his daughter. Together, in 1859, they founded the Richings Opera Company, which for many years toured the United States performing operas in English. At the turn of the century, Chicago's leading critic, George P. Upton, said of opera in English that it “did not get a firm foothold until Caroline Richings appeared upon the scene. She was the smartest, brightest, hardest working artist of them all.”

At the time of the Luisa Miller premiere, however, she was at the start of her career. She had made her operatic debut in February 1852 in Philadelphia as Marie in Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment. The opera was one of a brief season at the Walnut Street Theatre presented by the Seguin Opera Troupe, a small group led by Edward Seguin (bass baritone), which went from city to city, usually employing the local theater's orchestra, chorus, and secondary singers. Besides the Daughter of the Regiment, Richings in that season also sang leading roles in L'elisir d'Amore, Sonnambula, Linda di Chamounix, and Norma, all in English.