Edvard Schiffauer was born in Ostrava in an educated upper-middle-class family. However, the family's quality of life degraded after the communist 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état. In 1960, Schiffauer started his study at the Technical University of Ostrava, which he discontinued, but he completed his Master's degree at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Ostrava in 1964. He also started studying musical composition in the Academy of Performing Arts.