Richard Goldner (born Richard Goldner; 23 June 1908 – 27 September 1991) was an Austrian-Australian musician, violist, violinist, music teacher, and inventor. He founded Musica Viva Australia, Australia's largest independent classical-music producing organization.
Goldner was born into a Romanian Jewish family in Craiova, Romania. In 1908 he moved with his family to Vienna. He began studying the violin at the age of four or five and entered the architecture faculty of the Vienna University of Technology in 1925, but did not complete the course. From 1927 to 1930 he studied music at the New Vienna Conservatory, where his teachers included Bronisław Huberman and Szymon Pullman.
From the mid-1920s, Goldner played viola in ensembles and orchestras at the New Vienna Conservatory and elsewhere, including Pullman's orchestra. After Pullman's orchestra was dissolved in 1938, Goldner and his brother emigrated to Australia in 1939 and settled in Sydney.
Before the brothers became naturalized in 1944, Goldner was unable to take up the position of principal violist of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. They worked in the jewellery business and produced costume jewellery. During this period they invented a durable zipper design that was used in parachute manufacture; their invention was patented in Australia and abroad and manufactured by their company, Triflex Pty Ltd.
Using the capital he earned, Goldner founded the seventeen-player Musica Viva Australia string chamber orchestra in 1945, drawing mainly on European refugees. The orchestra gave ten concerts in 1946 and twenty in 1947. In 1948 Goldner and the ensemble toured Australian and New Zealand cities, performing in Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide, and elsewhere; later, they gave as many as 170 concerts annually.
Goldner also taught violin and viola from the early 1950s. He taught at the New South Wales State Conservatorium from 1960 to 1965, moved to the United States in 1966, and became professor of music at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1968. From 1977 to 1987, he taught at a private school and chaired the music department at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
A street in Canberra was named after Goldner in 1992. The Richard Goldner Prize for winners of an orchestral string-instrument competition was established in 1993, followed by the Richard Goldner String Quartet in 1995. The Richard Goldner Foundation supports promising young musicians.