The Retransition as Sign: Listener-Orientated Approaches to Tonal Closure in Haydn's Sonata-Form Movements

Music psychologists interested in the perception of tonal closure might do worse than investigate the Classical retransition as a sign of impending resolution. Haydn tends to attract more than his fair share of ‘listener-orientated’ approaches, perhaps on account of his attested sensitivity to his audience's cognitive ‘processing limits’. His well-known remark to Griesinger that, isolated at Eszterháza, he ‘could make experiments, observe what elicited or weakened an impression, and thus correct, add, delete, take risks’ conveys the impression of an artist clearly in touch with his public. And yet this most playful of composers exploited this rapport to mislead his listeners, making aesthetic capital out of systematic disinformation.