Goldner and his wife, Marianne née Reiss, with his brother and sister-in-law, escaped the Nazi oppression of Jews in Austria and arrived in Australia on the Orama in March 1939, six months before the start of World War II.
[2][4] They invented a new style of zipper that was resistant to sand and would not break under war-time conditions,[10] and which was vitally needed for use in the manufacture of parachutes.
[4][11][12] In 2011, the Oscar-winning former film maker Suzanne Baker published Beethoven and the Zipper: The Astonishing Story of Musica Viva.
[13] During the war, the then Minister for Immigration, Harold Holt, was personally very helpful in arranging passage for Richard Goldner's parents to Australia.
(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.
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.
[15] 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.
[4] 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.
[12] The Richard Goldner Award was founded by the Balmain Sinfonia in 1993, and goes to the winner of a biennial concerto competition for the player of an orchestral string instrument.