Edward H. Tarr, a trumpeter and musicologist who became one of the world’s eminent authorities on the instrument, resuscitating long-forgotten repertory and leading the way in historically informed performances of baroque and romantic brass music, died on March 24 in Germany. He was 83.

The cause was complications of heart surgery, his wife, Irmtraud Tarr, said. He died in a hospital near Rheinfelden, the town in southwestern Germany where he lived.

Mr. Tarr left his mark on every aspect of the trumpet world. As a player he set new standards of lyricism on an instrument long associated with military bravado. As a scholar he hunted for rarities in European archives and created performance editions of hundreds of newly discovered works. He advised instrument makers, curated a trumpet museum, wrote seminal books, edited historical treatises and taught players who went on to become leading concert artists.

For a brief period Mr. Tarr dipped into the European avant-garde. He commissioned a work for trumpet and tape, “Morceau de Concert,” from the Argentine-born German composer Mauricio Kagel, and he is among the dedicatees of “Spiral,” by the modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen. Mr. Tarr in 1970 was one of 20 musicians who took turns performing that piece a total of 1,300 times inside the German pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan.