When the Swiss composer Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–1995) celebrated his 80th birthday in 1990, a discordant note was sounded by Antje Müller in the main Swiss musicological journal Dissonanz. Sutermeister had enjoyed his first major successes in Nazi Germany, and Müller now subjected this fact to more intensive scrutiny than had anyone before her, questioning how ‘neutral’ a creative artist can be in his dealings with a totalitarian state.