English edit

Etymology edit

piano +‎ -mania

Noun edit

pianomania (uncountable)

  1. A great popularity of piano music in a population.
    • 1976, The Herald - Volumes 5-8, page 19:
      Pianomania had struck the nation - all classes, both sexes.
    • 1990, Frank Milo Scheide, The History of Low Comedy and Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century English Music Hall as Basis for Examining the 1914-1917 Films of Charles Spencer Chaplin, page 28:
      The popularity of the drawing room ballad was due, in part, to a "pianomania" resulting from the introduction of the upright piano around 1827.
    • 1996, Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants, page 45:
      The high point of pianomania fell in the period when the choirboys' style set the pace for Jewish-American music and when Jewish sheet music began to proliferate.
    • 1998, Jeremy Siepmann, The Piano:
      The London branch was closed down, and the firm's output failed to expand, despite the pianomania which had by then spread to every region of the globe.
  2. A strong interest in pianos and piano music (in an individual)
    • 1931, George Bernard Shaw, The Works of Bernard Shaw - Volume 26, page 83:
      Students of that curious disease, pianomania, which fills St James's Hall with young ladies every afternoon during the season, and puts countless sums into the pockets of teaching virtuosos, will find such a treat in Bettina Walker's My Musical Experiences, just published by Bentley, as they have not enjoyed since Miss Fay's Music Study in Germany.
    • 1960, “The Virtuoso Emerges”, in Newsweek, volume 55, page 108:
      A living legend among musicians, "a genius with pianomania," one of the great viruosi of the Soviet Union swept into the capital of Finland last week on the Moscow-Helsinki Express and took the city by storm.
    • 1997, James Benjamin Loeffler, A Gilgul Fun a Nigun: Jewish Musicians in New York, 1881-1945, page 37:
      For the IMF's support of musical amateurism fed into an existing channel of casual music-making in the Jewish immigrant home: "pianomania."