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Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

pianomania en · NOUN

Pronunciation

Etymology

From piano + -mania.

Meanings

  1. (uncountable) A great popularity of piano music in a population.
    • The popularity of the drawing room ballad was due, in part, to a "pianomania" resulting from the introduction of the upright piano around 1827. 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 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. 1996, Mark Slobin, Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants, page 45:
    • 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. 1998, Jeremy Siepmann, The Piano:
    • Pianomania had struck the nation - all classes, both sexes. 1976, The Herald - Volumes 5-8, page 19:
  2. (uncountable) A strong interest in pianos and piano music (in an individual)
    • 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. 1931, George Bernard Shaw, The Works of Bernard Shaw - Volume 26, page 83:
    • 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. 1960, “The Virtuoso Emerges”, in Newsweek, volume 55, page 108:
    • For the IMF's support of musical amateurism fed into an existing channel of casual music-making in the Jewish immigrant home: "pianomania." 1997, James Benjamin Loeffler, A Gilgul Fun a Nigun: Jewish Musicians in New York, 1881-1945, page 37: