Musica Viva Australia’s musical legacy continues
'I often think I cannot imagine what Australia would have sounded like without the foundation of Musica Viva'
What began as a simple desire to recreate the European salon tradition has blossomed into one of the world’s leading chamber music organisations.
In 2025, Musica Viva Australia marks its 80th anniversary, celebrating a remarkable journey that began with two Jewish émigré musicians who refused to let their musical dreams be extinguished.
The story of Musica Viva starts in December 1945, when Walter Dullo and Richard Goldner organised a concert at Verbrugghen Hall in Sydney.
The two musicians, who had escaped Nazi Europe in the late 1930s, found themselves initially unable to perform professionally due to strict musicians’ union restrictions.
By 1945, when those barriers lifted, they seized the opportunity to recreate what they missed most from home: intimate chamber music for friends.
“It’s kind of worth remembering what a cultural outpost Australia was in the 1930s,” Paul Kildea, Musica Viva’s artistic director told The AJN.
“The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was a very small ensemble until 1939, so all of these things that we now take for granted didn’t exist.”
What Goldner and Dullo created was revolutionary for its time. Chamber music wasn’t part of the colonial cultural model, which focused heavily on symphony orchestras following the English tradition.
“Chamber music was something very specific and very Western European, and not terribly English,” Kildea noted.
Today, Musica Viva Australia continues this pioneering spirit.
The organisation presents cutting-edge collaborations, new commissions and world premieres alongside much-loved classics, as it honours its past while looking toward the future.
The 2025 season features eight national tours with world-renowned artists including the Colorado-based Takács Quartet, Polish-Hungarian pianist Piotr Anderszewski, and Indigenous singer-songwriter Jess Hitchcock.
“I often think I cannot imagine what Australia would have sounded like without the foundation of Musica Viva,” Kildea reflected, saying the 2025 tour celebrating the 80th anniversary honours the original ideas of Dullo and Goldner.
The organisation’s founding principle remains unchanged: introducing Australian audiences to music they don’t yet know.
Currently touring with early Basset clarinets, Musica Viva continues to expand musical horizons just as it did in 1945, showing audiences that music doesn’t always have to be experienced in the same way.
“The thing about chamber music is that it doesn’t have a conductor. It’s a dialogue between equal musicians,” Kildea explained, saying it’s a unique way to listen to music, especially contrasted against orchestras that can be hierarchical.
For the 80th anniversary year, Musica Viva has chosen to celebrate Australia’s multicultural heritage through music.
One touring program, Sonnet in Emigration, features Bertolt Brecht’s poetry about the emigré experience in America.
“I’ve wanted, through this whole season, celebrating 80 years in an incredibly politically partisan atmosphere, to say that emigration and immigration has made Australia immeasurably better in so many different ways,” Kildea said.
It’s a tribute to the successive waves of immigration that have enriched Australian culture, from food and science to music and the arts.
As Musica Viva enters its ninth decade, it remains one of the world’s leading presenters of chamber music in concert halls and classrooms and supports emerging artists and Australian composers.
“We’re about to launch 2026, and you know, on it goes,” Kildea said. “It’s the next 80 years now.”
For more information and to book tickets, visit musicaviva.com.au