Jiří Pauer was bom into the family of a (coal) miner, and his way to the career of a composer and musician was rather complicated. He started as a music teacher (in the late thirties), and first he studied composition privately with the then teacher of music theory Otakar Šín. Then he continued to study composition with Alois Haba (1943 - 1946) at Prague conservatory. In that period of time he composed his cycles of songs Children 's Lullabies and A Snowed-up Road, some instructive piano pieces, .Suite 1945' for piano and Grotesquesfor Oboe, Clarinet and Bassoon. Since 1946 he studied composition with Pavel Borkovec at the newly founded Academy of Perforrning Arts and Music in Prague. He ended his studies with Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra (1949) which met with great success from the very beginning. Since then the bassoon concerto was perforrned quite often not only in Czech lands but in many foreign countries as well. Just after finishing his studies at the Academy (1950) he completed an one-act opera The Prattling Snail, a colourful and poetic fairy-tale which soon became very succesful on the stage of the National Theatre in Prague. 
Pauer was not only a remarkable composer, but he was also a man with extraordinary abilities as an organizer and teacher. He was employed gradually as a teacher of the new Prague City School ofMusic, further at the Ministry ofEducation, at the Czechoslovak Radio, and twice as a chief of the National Theatre Opera (1951-56, and 1965-67). Further he shortly worked as a clerc at the Copyrights Society of Authors, as artistic director of Czech Philharmonic (1958 - 1980}, and he was appointed Professor of composition at the Academy of'Performing Arts in Prague (1967 - 1990). Since 1979 he was also employed as artistic director ofthe National Theatre (untiI 1990). After the Velvet revolution (in the 1990s) he had been living in seclusion writing his memoirs (it was published in 2000), and later on he became very ill (partly paralyzed after a stroke).