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,
Maeve Gilmore Alone", the third novel in his series of Titus books, following "Titus Groan" (1946), and "Gormenghast" (1950), only with difficulty. When published in 1959 "Titus Alone" was less polished than he might have wished, but he was beyond correcting it. He had always planned a longer series, taking his hero up to his forties at least. On his death from Parkinson's disease in November 1968, Peake left a few pages of notes for a fourth book, of which fewer than a thousand words are legible. During the 1970s, Gilmore worked on the fourth Titus book herself, inspired partly by the