This article discusses a peculiar kind of ‘mute’ musical performance that features in Romantisk berättelse (1953, ‘Romantic Tale’) of the Swedish Nobel Prize Laureate Eyvind Johnson (1900–1976). Here, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 57, the Appassionata, appears not as an experience of sound but mainly as a visual experience of the pianist’s moving limbs, as they are perceived by a young working-class writer, Olle. Olle sees himself excluded from a musical community; this feeling of alienation results in deliberately non-acoustic descriptions of musical performance, where it is not primarily the sound, but the performer’s bodily presence that is stressed. Yet such absence of sound should not only be understood as some kind of deficit. By writing a performative ‘mute’ ekphrasis, Johnson deliberately questions the ideas of the transcendence of instrumental music as well as its alleged status as a universal language.