Music and Time Annotation << Back Music for Flute by German composers of the 17th– 18th Centuries: to the Question of Interpretation I.V. Stachinskaya The article is devoted to the disclosure of the features of the compositions for the flute of ancient German music. The flute received the status of a solo concert instrument owing to the works of the greatest German composers of the 17th-18th centuries. This article is one of the attempts to identify the features of the interpretation of German flute music through the compositional rhetoric of the Baroque era in Russian musicology. Musical compositions for flute of that time are based on the improvisational freedom of performing a musical theme in the redistribution of a certain mode, tempo and meter, which represents a greater degree of freedom of performance than in works of a later time. However, the improvisational grace in the performance of the works of G.F. Handel, G.F. Telemann, I.S. Bach is not to be seen merely as a sample of pure sensation or a search for a balance between free and fixed recording. In the search for the authenticity of the interpretation of the Baroque era works, the principles of rhetoric were laid as the basis for understanding and reproducing musical texts. Keywords: wind art, flute mastery, German flute music, baroque era, baroque style, interpretation of flute music, rhetorical figures. Pp. 37-43.