Vater unser im Himmelreich

Nine days ago, while skating, I had a little accident and broke my left wrist and tore the ligaments of my left knee. The left side of my body is therefore out of the game of playing the organ for a while.

Last weekend I decided to try and climb on the organ bench very carefully. It took me a while, yet I succeeded. Only, what to play with one hand and one foot?

When you're a pianist and you lose the ability to play with your right hand, there still exists a large body of literature for the left hand only. For a large part this literature exists because of Paul Wittgenstein. He was a promising concert pianist in the early years of the 20th century, when he lost his right arm in the first world war. Determined to make a career as a concert pianist anyway, he used his enormous fortune to commission works from a number of contemporary composers. So we owe our thanks to him for works for the left hand by Ravel, Britten, Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Franz Schmidt and many others.

As far as I know, no music specifically for the left (or the right, for that matter) hand and feet has ever been written for organ. No amount of googling these last few days has turned something up. Either oranists were lucky in the war or they just gave up playing after loosing a hand or a foot.

Then I stumbled on this composition by Telemann. And I realised I could try and play the with my right hand and right foot. With my right foot I play the right hand part, played an octave lower then notated and registered with a 4' stop to make it sound at the right pitch. And with my right hand I play the left hand part, an octave higher than notated, but registered with a 16' stop to make it sound at the right pitch. The most confusing part was to train my right hand to play the bottom one of the two staves.