Carlos Barbosa-Lima, a guitarist who brought a dazzling virtuosity to the stage, exploring classical music, jazz and compositions from his native Brazil during a career of more than six decades, died Wednesday at a hospital in Paraty, Brazil. He was 77.

The cause was a heart attack, said Larry Del Casale, a New York guitarist who often performed with Barbosa-Lima.

A child prodigy who made his professional debut at age 12, Barbosa-Lima combined a flawless classical technique with an inventive and eclectic musical approach. His vast repertoire ranged from Bach to the Beatles, from Gershwin to Jobim, and included a large number of works he adapted for guitar.

He toured the world with his guitar, which he considered a universal instrument, common to many musical traditions, which embodied an almost infinite array of musical colors and moods.

“The guitar is so important in so many cultures,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “It’s a real people’s instrument. … I think it facilitates a kind of very diverse, multicultural approach.”

Barbosa-Lima followed in a long line of Brazilian guitar masters, including Luiz Bonfá, Laurindo Almeida and João Gilberto. Barbosa-Lima sometimes appeared with classical orchestras, but he performed more often in solo concerts or with other guitarists, including Almeida and the late Washington-based jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd.

Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera wrote a guitar sonata for Barbosa-Lima, which he performed for the first time in Washington in 1976. Washington Post music reviewer Joseph McLellan pronounced the sonata – now a standard part of the guitar repertoire – “a major event” and said Barbosa-Lima “demonstrated what the instrument can do when it is at the service of a vital musical imagination.”

Barbosa-Lima developed such a precise touch on the guitar that the audience could never hear the telltale slide of his fingers on the fretboard. He kept the nails of his right hand slightly long for plucking the strings.

Throughout his childhood, he studied with Isaias Sávio, a Uruguayan guitar teacher who settled in Brazil in the 1930s. Savio taught him to build the strength and dexterity of his left hand, which shapes the chords on the guitar. Barbosa-Lima was especially renowned for the extraordinary reach of the fingers on his left hand, which allowed him to produce unusual harmonies and to play bass lines and melodies simultaneously.

“You can be more comfortable using counterpoint lines instead of just playing block chords or a single melody line and an occasional chord,” he told Guitar Player magazine in 2008. “You begin to feel the inner voicing, and it is fascinating where you can go with that.”

During the 1980s, Barbosa-Lima worked with his fellow Brazilian, Antônio Carlos Jobim, the primary composer behind the bossa nova movement, to arrange his music for solo guitar.

“At that time, there were actually very few good charts” – arrangements – “of his music, and he was the first one to complain,” Barbosa-Lima told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1995. “He said, ‘Let’s get together and at least make sure that the harmonies are the way I composed them.’ ”

Barbosa-Lima recorded frequently with the Concord jazz label in the 1980s and 1990s, including a 1982 album that combined Jobim’s music with guitar arrangements of the works by George Gershwin. Barbosa-Lima also adapted the ragtime music of Scott Joplin for guitar, recorded with classical guitarist Sharon Isbin and with Almeida and Byrd, who had helped popularize bossa nova music in the early 1960s. He recorded more than 40 albums throughout his career.

Quiet and understated in his manner, Barbosa-Lima freely mixed musical genres that made some purists scoff. In a single concert, he would jump from the works of Bach and Scarlatti to Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo, Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”

“The common denominator is always the classical foundation. Then you expand your tastes,” Barbosa-Lima said. “I like to explore all the angles, capture the flavor of other styles and mold it to my guitar which, I believe, is a little orchestra in itself.”

He said he was encouraged to explore various musical styles after an youthful conversation with Spanish guitar master Andrés Segovia, who told him to “listen to all kinds of music and try to search my soul for how it makes me feel.”

Antonio Carlos Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima was born Dec. 17, 1944, in São Paulo. His father was a pharmaceutical salesman, and his mother was a homemaker.

When young Carlos was a child, his father began to take guitar lessons and got nowhere. But with no previous musical training, 7-year-old Carlos picked up the guitar and was able to the play the music his father struggled to learn. His father soon found teachers for his son, including Savio, and eventually became his manager.

Barbosa-Lima made his São Paulo debut in 1957 and had his first recording sessions a year later. By 1960, he was touring throughout South America and later North America and Europe. After moving to the United States, he taught at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in the 1970s and at the Manhattan School of Music in the 1980s. He lived in Puerto Rico for several years.

For the past 20 years, Barbosa-Lima often performed and recorded with Del Casale, a onetime schoolteacher. Their 2013 album, “Beatlerianas,” which featured the Havana String Quartet and included Beatles tunes and music by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, received a Latin Grammy nomination. Barbosa-Lima’s most recent album, “Delicado,” with Del Casale and other musicians, appeared in 2019.

“Everything was the guitar with Carlos,” Del Casale said in an interview. “That’s all he did. He was all about the music.”

Survivors include a sister.

“The guitar is like a second body, always next to me,” Barbosa-Lima said in 1995. “I have always loved its intimacy. You hold it close to your body; there’s always contact. I can feel it vibrate through my body when I play. I caress it and it responds. Well, usually.”