Living Opera Pioneers Decentralized Grantmaking Through Magic Mozart NFT Collection

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Living Opera, a web3 multimedia startup, announces the launch of Magic Mozart, a non-fungible token (NFT) collection consisting of 1,791 NFTs based on the music and image of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his seminal composition of The Magic Flute that premiered on September 30^th, 1791. Each layer of the NFT contains artistic features from The Magic Flute, as well as unique and personalized on-chain musical compositions from the first wide-scale demonstration of generative music through a dice game called Muskalisches Würfelspiel attributed to Mozart.

In addition to the unique digital art and music, NFT holders will gain access to several dimensions of utility, such as first access to Living Opera music NFTs and a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to see Soula Parassidis and Norman Reinhardt – two of the founders – perform in Athens, Greece or Valencia, Spain in 2023, as well as a guest appearance in an upcoming documentary in Greece.

The funds will also contribute towards the launch and maintenance of the Living Arts DAO, an ecosystem for decentralizing grant-making in the performing arts and bringing practitioners and lovers of classical music together to build and journey. Decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs for short, leverage smart contracts and distributed governance to execute tasks at scale, often among geographically dispersed communities united by a common goal.

"The way we have funded the arts, especially in opera, over the last several decades has not changed much, but our research finds that individual artists have experienced wage stagnation and/or decline," said Canadian-Greek soprano and CEO of Living Opera Soula Parassidis. "NFTs provide a way for people to directly support the artists they love, and receive rewards, access to special content, and participate in global artistic communities via the blockchain," she continued.

Arts and culture philanthropists donated nearly $24 billion in 2021, but these donations rarely trickle through to the lives of individual artists. "We believe that blockchain can help bring transparency and accountability to arts philanthropy and our DAO is a step in that direction… our Living Arts DAO pilot among the Living Opera community opens a frontier of possibilities to remunerate artists and connect them with philanthropists so both sides grow and learn," said Christos Makridis, COO of Living Opera.

Magic Mozart is the first of several NFT collections that Living Opera will launch, including: Dream Girl – a music NFT collection based on Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder that takes listeners through an emotional journey exploring the fragility of love, the passing of time, and the highs and lows of human existence in just 20 minutes of heart pounding music – and Divina – a fashion and music NFT collection that pays homage to the genius of opera sensation Maria Callas on the 100^th anniversary of her birth in 2023.

The full collection of Magic Mozart NFTs can be viewed and purchased at https://mozart.livingopera.org/.

Founded by two opera singers and an economist, Living Opera is a multimedia art-technology company that unites the classical music and blockchain communities to produce transformative content. Living Opera takes a holistic approach to life, work, and education: "living" means "full of life and vigor," and "opera" means (in Latin) "labor, effort, attention, or work." Living Opera NFT collections, such as Magic Mozart, are designed to bring the art and tech worlds together by expanding the audience of people who traditionally engage with classical music and fine art.

SOURCE Living Opera