Jim, when readers don't mention any perception of underlying pain, and when they say they don't sense a turn, I have to wonder whether they are picking up on what I intended. As a child, I was simply bowled over by the power and passion of the playing; as an adult, I view that passion through a different lens. So, I would say that the last four lines state what the child perceived, but in the context of the rest of the poem, what the adult sensed about the source of that passion exists as well. Or so I would like to think.
The lines "Calm and self-effacing / in public, but a whiz at bridge" were meant to suggest that anyone who met her for the first time would not pay any attention to her and would tend to underestimate her abilities at bridge or anything else--until he or she saw her in action. Perhaps "whiz" is not forceful enough. I would use "formidable" except that it doesn't fit in the line.
I have revisited the issue of italics in the last line. Typically, the title of a work that is long and complete in itself goes into italics, and short works or works that are part of a longer work go into quotation marks. The former is true of Moonlight Sonata, so I have changed that to italics, but "Clair de Lune" is part of a longer work, so I am leaving that in quotation marks.
Susan
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