What was Brahms hiding behind that beard? Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS

News from Russia's culture minister that Tchaikovsky almost certainly wasn't gay but just a lonely man who failed to find a suitable woman is hardly the greatest shock the musical world has to deal with recently. New research from the University of the Klagenmünchen am Meer, Lower-middle Westphalia, has confirmed what many music-lovers have long suspected: that Beethoven's deafness was a fiction, a condition he fabricated for the purposes of narcissistic self-glorifying vanity to make sure the rest of the world would be totally in awe of the music he subsequently composed. A letter written at the same time as the Heiligenstadt Testament - that supposedly despairing document about his hearing loss which is now revealed as a complete fib - has been unearthed in the cellar of one of Ludwig's favourite pubs in the Wienerwald to his Immortal Beloved saying (the translation is mine), "I've done it! It's the joke of all jokes! Now they'll REALLY think I'm a genius! Mozart and Haydn will have nothing on me!!! Up yours Wolfgang! Plus I can now be even grumpier, and no-one will mind. Magic!! PS: know where I can get any good ear-trumpets?"

And that's not all. That Johannes Brahms's beard was a psychological disguise has always been admitted, masking Johannes's inveterate shyness, self-pitying morbidity, and perennial sexual frustrations. But it's not until now, and findings released in a new collection of essays (The Beard in Crisis: Masculinity, Subjectivity, and the Hirsute Performativity of Gender in 19th Century Central Europe – A Critical Reader (University of Bart College, Indiana), that the astonishing truth has come to light. Under one of the floorboards in Brahms's bachelor pad in Vienna, a stash of fake beards in various stages of greyness has been discovered. This - at last! - explains why there are no photos or images of Brahms in between clean-shaven late-pubescence and full-on beardy-weirdy fulsomeness. What was he hiding? Something even more remarkable: a collection of hosiery, corsetry, and undergarmentry that correspond roughly to Brahms's rotundity suggest that his performance of gender went beyond merely hiding behind a beard. Those otherwise inexplicable comments from Brahms's favourite courtesans in Vienna's cafés - "Johannes was one of us!", Elisabeth Schwanenberg said after his death - now begin to make sense…

Brahms's cross-dressing is just the start though. Next week: Britten's wives! Bruckner's atheism! Mozart's opium addiction! Wagner's love-letters to Mendelssohn! Man. I love revisionist history.