This is such a huge question, so just to be concise I'd say that we are inevitably left in the dark about ornamentation and across different periods, simply as most of what people would have added in improvisation, has not been put down to paper.
I recently went to see Robert Levin who played K.488 by Mozart with the OAE here in London.
He played Barbara Ployel's embellishments of the slow movement one of the most serene in all Mozart. As he puts it 'where Mozart wrote 1 note, Ployel added 12!
His point was that as she was Mozart's composition pupil her version must reflect something along the lines of what Mozart must have played in performances. Not these exact notes, of course, but as Mozart was prized above all as an improviser rather then a composer at the time, he would have undoubtedly played these sort of flourishes, partly to sustain the fast decaying sound of his piano but also to dazzle his audience!
Here's a link to a short BBC interview with Levin - I hope this works outside the UK:
To give another example from my field: some Elizabethan lute sources have no grace note signs, others have a few and some have them on nearly every note!
While it's perfectly possible that people differed then as now according to their taste or skill, I doubt that they either played lots of ornaments or none at all, but rather that some sources are rich in this sort of information while others are lacking.
But had we not these ornamented versions, or Ployel's version among others, our picture of how these respective repertoires were performed would have been incomplete.
I agree that whether we play on the 'right instruments' or not, we have to be completely convinced of whatever we do.
I personally would try to get used to those ornaments you mentioned and live with them for quite a while. But ultimately, I would not play them if I wasn't happy with them. Ideally, one should play written out ornaments with the feeling 'I wish I'd thought of that!...
My point however, is that the scarcity of such versions can lead us to excessive discretion, as we might regard them as extravaganzas, rather than the norm. Our notion of style is the only thing we can go by, but this has to be as informed as possible and we must use our imagination to become re accustomed to what may, or indeed must have been the norm, as shocking as it might sound to our ears, rather than by our own era's prevailing inhibition to add anything to Mozart or Bach.
the last point I'd like to make is that sometimes it's not so easy to define what an ornament is exactly, as in a sense a melodic line is already an embellishment of the harmonic structure.
To cite a famous example: the E minor prelude from WTC1 exists in a version in the Clavier Buchlein for WF Bach where it consists of nothing but chords in the left hand over the walking bass.
I think it's quite doubtful that this was Bach's initial concept of the piece, or indeed that this is the way he or anyone else at the time would have played it, but rather that they would have improvised passages to link those chords, as in the WTC version.
So here, the ornaments have actually become the piece so to speak...
Yet, had we not had this beautifully embellished version as well, everyone nowadays would have played that other austere version and with great conviction too!
I wasn't able to include the link to the BBC website. Any technical advice on how to do it here?
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