Gormenghast (opera) Gormenghast (opera) Gormenghast is an opera in three acts composed by Irmin Schmidt to an English-language libretto by Duncan Fallowell, based on Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast Trilogy". It premiered at the Opernhaus Wuppertal on 15 November 1998. Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast Trilogy", on which the opera is based, is a Gothic tale recounting the rise of the evil Steerpike from a kitchen boy in Gormenghast castle to total domination of the castle and its aristocratic inhabitants. Benjamin Britten had contemplated composing an opera based on the trilogy in the 1950s, but then changed his mind. Irmin Schmidt and his librettist Duncan Fallowell,
Mervyn Peake Anne Press (2012). In 2010 an archive consisting of 28 containers of material, which included correspondence between Peake and Laurie Lee, Walter de la Mare and C. S. Lewis, plus 39 Gormenghast notebooks and original drawings for both "Alice Through the Looking Glass" and "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", was acquired by the British Library. Peake's three children presented on BBC Radio Four in 2018 a half-hour memoir of their father's life, emphasizing the importance of the island of Sark. In 1983, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast eight hour-long episodes for radio dramatising the complete Gormenghast Trilogy. This was the first