The composer Svatopluk Havelka studied composition privately with K. B. Jirak (from 1945 to 47), while a student of musicology at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University under Josef Hutter and Antonin Sychra. Sychra, together with B. Liebich, was his teacher of musical education at the University, from which he graduated in 1949. Havelka subsequently became a member of the music department of Czechoslovak Radio in Ostrava. At the same time he was the founder and artistic director of the NOTA Ensemble (1949 - 1950). For the next four years he was an instructor and composer with the Army Art Ensemble. Since 1954 he has devoted himself full-time to a career as a professional composer.

Havelka's composition style was originally rooted in the national tradition with particular accent placed on the melodiousness of Moravian folk music and on a distinctly dance oriented type of composition. A major landmark in Havelka's career came with his First Symphony (1955) which was a great step forward towards a new symphonism. Another milestone was the cantata In Praise of Light (1959), a composition offering a new type of revived but newly evolved cantata form. Each composition written since then has marked fresh efforts to find a non-traditional approach to compositional problems. Since the 1960s composer had been making ample use of the stimuli provided by so called Musica Nova (aleatorics, the harmonic components, sound elements), although the main contours of Havelka's works were determined by traditional evolutionary and thematic thinking. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s his music had shown definite signs of more synthetic, as well as meditative nature.

In 1957, Havelka was awarded the silver medal at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow for his Symphony No 1. Since that time, he has received many other awards, including the State Prize in 1961 for his cantata In Praise of Light, the 1964 Prize of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, the 1981 Award of the Czech Minister of Culture for the film music to The Prince and the Evening Star, the 1988 Panton Golden Shield and the 1989 State Prize for his Oratorio, Jerome of Prague. In addition, he had received a number of other awards specifically for his film scores, including When the Tom Cat Comes, 1963, and All Good Nationes, 1968, both directed by Vojtech Jasny. Havelka was made a Merited Artist in 1987.