Traces the history of the Gregorian revival from its Romantic origins in a community of French monks at Solesmes, whose founder hoped to rebuild the moral foundation of French culture on the ruins of the Benedictine order.
"Decadent Enchantments is an essay in culture history about chant scholarship as a phenomenon, an engaging, lively, and stimulating case study of Romantic and post-Romantic historicism run rampant, with brilliant aperçues and colorful analogies on almost every page."-Harold Powers, coauthor of Puccini's Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition
"This meditation on the nineteenth-century restoration of Gregorian chant will speak to historians and cultural analysts from a number of different fields. It adds to the growing list of musicological writings in which historical narrative joins in eloquent union with broad and sophisticated knowledge of recent cultural theory. The Benedictine monks of Solesmes and the repertory they did so much to define for the twentieth century will never seem quite the same."-Gary Tomlinson, author of Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others
"Katherine Bergeron discovers surprising connections between the recovery of chant, on the one hand, and on the other, Romantic decadence, print culture, facsimile technology, cultures of literacy, and much else. Decadent Enchantments is a model of historiography."-Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
