The opera's libretto was adapted by the composer from a 1920 serialized novella, Liška Bystrouška, by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, which was first published in the newspaper Lidové noviny (with illustrations by Stanislav Lolek).

When Janáček discovered Těsnohlídek's comic-strip-inspired story and decided to turn it into an opera, in 1921, he began work by meeting with the author and studying the animals.

With this understanding of the characters involved, his own 70 years of life experience, and an undying, unrequited love for the much younger, married Kamila Stösslová, he began work on the opera.

The premiere took place on 6 November 1924 in National Theatre Brno conducted by František Neumann, with Ota Zítek as director and Eduard Milén as stage designer.

The opera incorporates Moravian folk music and rhythms as it recounts the life of a clever (alternative reading: sharp-eared) fox and accompanying wildlife, as well as a few humans, and their small adventures while traversing their lifecycles.

[9] In 1981, the New York City Opera mounted a production in English based on images created by Maurice Sendak and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas in his company debut.

This production returned the opera to its roots by utilizing animation and hand drawn video sets by the artists Bill Barminski and Christopher Louie of Walter Robot Studios.

Time passes (in the form of an orchestral interlude) and we see the vixen, now grown up into a young adult (and sung by a soprano) tied up in the forester's yard with the conservative old dachshund.

Fed up with life in confinement, the vixen chews through her rope, attacks the rooster and hen, kills the other chickens, jumps over the fence and runs off to freedom.

Janáček based The Cunning Little Vixen's tonality on modes (similarly to much output during his last decade), expanding the music's harmonic range through the utilisation of the seventh and ninth chords.

[11] The composition makes frequent use of folk-influenced rhythms and "sčasovka" (personally-coined term for a short motif), while it has been noted to contain similarities to the music of French composer Claude Debussy.