Leoš Janaček was born on 3 July 1854 in Hukvaldy, a village 30 km (18 miles) south of Ostrava in Moravia. Hukvaldy was named after the medieval castle that overlooks it (the reason it was sometimes known as ‘Pod Hukvaldy’, below Hukvaldy), but the castle itself had been allowed to become a romantic ruin after a fire in 1820. Janaček's father Jiři was the village schoolmaster, and Janaček was born in the schoolhouse, ‘in a room where one window looked on to the church, and the other on to the brewery’, as he later recalled. Leo Eugen, the names with which he was baptised on 4 July 1854, the day after he was born, was the ninth child of Amalie (nee Grulichova) and Jiři Janaček – who not only served as the village teacher but also its parish organist. The family had moved to Hukvaldy in 1848 and were well respected in the village, but only just got by financially as the schoolmaster in Hukvaldy was one of the worst-paid posts in the Moravian school system. Jiři was a talented musician: Janaček later remembered being taught Beethoven piano sonatas by him, and if the regime was strict and unforgiving, it was recalled with gratitude. At the age of eleven, Janaček became a chorister at the Augustinian Monastery in Old Brno.

At the time of Janaček's birth, Bohemia and Moravia were the Kronländer (Crown Lands) in the far northwest of the Habsburg Empire. Since the thirteenth century, there had been a large ethnic German minority in Moravia, mostly concentrated in the cities of Brno and Olomouc. In 1867, the year after Janaček started school in Brno, the Austro-Hungarian Compromise came as a blow to proponents of Czech self-rule: while Hungarian autonomy was recognised, the Czechs – the third largest group in the Empire numerically – were overlooked, and attempts to forge a similar agreement for Czech lands failed. On the one hand, this led to a hardening of attitudes towards the ruling monarchy in Vienna, but on the other, this period saw a flourishing of the Czech language and education, and the rediscovery of traditional culture, including folksong.