Klage um Ali Bey (Lament for Ali Bey) (D. 496a) is one of Schubert's rare comic songs. Unfortunately, it is not all that funny: a four-verse strophic song lamenting the death of the Egyptian Prince Ali Bey, Schubert's setting is a failed attempt at parody. The key is E flat minor. The piano accompaniment sounds like it was produced by a hurdy-gurdy, as in the last of the Winterreise songs, but in this case the hurdy-gurdy sounds less sorrowful than simply silly. And the vocal melody is a parody of the pseudo-Turkish music which was popular in Vienna at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of nineteenth centuries, but devoid of the wit Mozart and Beethoven brought to it.

A footnote to Schubert's songs; even Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau declined to record it.

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