For more than a century, cat lovers have accepted as true the allegation that Brahms slaughtered felines, transcribed the sounds of their dying moments and callously incorporated them in to his works.

But research proves that the foul calumny was almost certainly the work of Richard Wagner, a notoriously bitchy composer whose operas go on longer than one of the nine lives of an average mog.

Writing in the May issue of the BBC Music Magazine, Calum MacDonald, who is the author of a study of Brahms, dismisses the charge on empirical grounds. "In my own limited but miserable experience, dying cats don't tend to make much noise," he says.

In his review of the evidence, he notes that stories of Brahms killing cats surface mainly in books about cats rather than in books about music "which is suspicious in itself".

He finds one of the most recent accounts in Desmond Morris's Cat World, published in 1996, which claims that Brahms began cat bagging after the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak gave him a "Bohemian sparrow slaying bow".

Brahms used to take aim from his apartment window in Vienna, alleges Morris, who then quotes Wagner: "After spearing the poor brutes, he reeled them in to his room after the manner of a trout-fisher. Then he eagerly listened to the expiring groans of his victims and carefully jotted down in his notebook their ante mortem remarks."

Morris adds: "According to Wagner, who disliked Brahms, he worked these sounds into his chamber music."

MacDonald dismisses every detail of this account as suspect and reports that Morris cannot now find the source for Wagner's comments. He also explains that Wagner never visited Brahms's flat, so at best could only have been retailing gossip. Dvorak and Brahms met in 1880, only three years before Wagner died, leaving a very limited time for Brahms to become an expert with the Bohemian bow and for Wagner to get wind of the story, had it been true.

MacDonald adds: "Dvorak would presumably have to have given Brahms the bow in person but their collected correspondence contains no letter saying, 'Please, Honoured Master, accept this amusing artefact from my native land'."

He then asks: "Is there really such a thing as a 'Bohemian sparrow slaying bow'?

"Brahms's 'apartment' is presumably his flat in the Karlgasse, which was several floors up, so he'd need a long line to haul up any speared moggies. Did sparrow slaying bows have lines attached? It surely wouldn't be strong enough to haul in dying cats, especially if they were struggling."

After consulting Styra Avins, editor of Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, MacDonald learned that in 1893 - when Brahms was still alive - a music critic for the New York Times, James Huneker, had cited the story of the composer's hatred of cats as an example of how biography could be contaminated by deliberate fiction. Huneker named Wagner as the guilty man.

"Brahms's supposed sadism is a malicious fabrication," MacDonald concludes. Which means the rest of us can listen to the clarinet quintet without fearing that some of its finest moments were inspired by a cat yowling its way to oblivion.

Catty genius

Richard Wagner (1818-1883)

The dramatic radical who took music into new realms of tonality and, with a godlike certainty of his genius, demanded universal applause. He built his own theatre in Bayreuth, Germany, in which to stage the music dramas on which his fame rests.

He proved irresistible to women, including Cosima, daughter of Franz Liszt and wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow, who apparently did not mind losing his partner to an intellectual superior.

Wagner wrote: "I am being used as the instrument for something higher than my own being warrants. I am in the hands of the immortal genius that I serve for the span of my life."

Trying to find something to say to Brahms after hearing one of his works, he commented: "The evil only starts when one attempts to compose better than one can."

Maligned maestro

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

A romantic who idolised Beethoven and was so intimidated by his predecessor's genius that he waited until he was 43 to produce his own first symphony. He wrote three more, plus two concertos for piano, one for violin, one for violin and cello and a series of chamber works.

Robert and Clara Schumann invited him to share their home. Brahms, who never had a lasting relationship with a woman, may have been in love with Clara. He supported her when Robert tried to kill himself.

In later life, he was known for his rudeness. Once, as he left a party in Vienna, he said: "If there is someone here whom I have not insulted, I apologise."