Richard Goldner's parents to Australia. Musica Viva In 1945 he founded "Richard Goldner's Sydney Musica Viva", whose first concert was held at the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music in Sydney on 8 December 1945, to an audience of over 1,000 people. The first item they played was Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, Op. 133, in honour of his teacher Simon Pullman. (Pullman's makeshift chamber ensemble had been playing the Grosse Fuge in the Warsaw Ghetto in August 1942 when they were rounded up and sent to Treblinka, only one of them surviving.) During Goldner's concert there was a power blackout, and car headlights, an Army generator and hurricane lamps were used for illumination. The success of the concert inspired Goldner to form an organisation for the promotion of chamber music in all its forms. In this he was supported by Hephzibah Menuhin (then married to an Australian and living in Victoria) and assisted by a fellow refugee named Walter Dullo, a German lawyer-turned-chocolate maker and musicologist. Together, Goldner and Dullo found 17 musicians (mostly also southern or central European refugees, and mostly Jewish) and formed them into four separate chamber groups under the name Musica Viva. The initial funding for the organisation came from Goldner himself, from the proceeds of the manufacture of his zipper. They developed a punishing playing schedule throughout Australia and New Zealand, giving 170 concerts and travelling 50,000 miles a year. Although they were always financially successful, this schedule became exhausting. This, plus the fact that Goldner had injured the first finger of his left hand while making another invention, led to Goldner retiring from playing in 1952, and the group was disbanded, but it reformed in 1954. Later life Goldner had always wanted to teach violin and viola, and to conduct young people's orchestras. In the early 1950s, Eugene Goossens, the Director of the NSW Conservatorium, approached him about teaching there, but he was far too busy with Musica Viva's playing schedule at that time. He was again approached in the early 1960s, this time by the new Director, Sir Bernard Heinze, and he was now in a position to accept a teaching position. He lectured in violin and viola. In 1966 he moved to the United States with his former pupil Charmian Gadd. They taught at Pittsburgh and Washington (state). They married in 1970, when he was 62, and returned to Australia in 1981. Richard