Some 30,000 people read it before they had finished screaming: Celine Dion did it. She hit the high F, held it, then blew out a breath and turned to look back at the band — a quick, disbelieving glance toward her musical director.
She’s really back,” said Élodie Marchand, 42, a primary schoolteacher from Nantes. Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. She was diagnosed in 2022 with stiff person syndrome. At the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower — one song, one night — and the world called it a resurrection. Saturday (September 12), she had to do it 25 times, then get up and do it again Wednesday.
Few doubted she could still sing. What nobody knew was whether she could get through a whole show and then get up and do it again a few nights later. “When she hit note, I grabbed my friend’s arm. I’d been holding my breath without realizing. Then I started crying. She’s back. A disease that goes for the throat. She canceled a world tour, then what was left of it, and went quiet. The last time France saw her sing, it lasted four minutes. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry’. She cried before she finished the first song.
It was “All By Myself,” the song the Quebec superstar’s voice has been measured against since 1996, saved for the encore of her first full concert in more than six years — her first since stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease, attacked her muscles, including those of the throat. “Touring can be very difficult even when you’re 100%,” she said in a statement in 2023, cancelling the last of her dates. In a Dior gown and a Boucheron necklace, she pressed her hands together in prayer, then missed her cue in “On ne change pas,” on the line about the skinny little girl from Charlemagne, Quebec.
