Nanterre crowd gives Celine Dion a roaring comeback after six years
Quebec singer Celine Dion played her first full concert in more than six years on Saturday night at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris. The performance was her first since stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease, attacked her muscles, including those of the throat.
Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. She was diagnosed in 2022 with stiff person syndrome, canceled a world tour and went quiet. Saturday’s show, the first of 16 in five weeks, ran 25 songs in 2 hours and 15 minutes.
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. The sold-out run includes 10 more shows booked for May 2027, 26 nights in all.
Dion told the crowd three words in French: “Je vais bien.” (“I’m doing fine.”)
“When she hit that note, I grabbed my friend’s arm. I’d been holding my breath without realizing. Then I started crying. ‘She’s back. She’s really back,'” said Élodie Marchand, 42, a primary schoolteacher from Nantes.
Stiff person syndrome affects one or two people in a million. It stiffens muscles and sets off spasms violent enough to break bones, triggered by loud noise, by touch, by emotional stress. An arena holding 30,000 people is all three at once. Singing with it, Dion told NBC in 2024, felt like being strangled.
“Touring can be very difficult even when you’re 100%,” she said in a statement in 2023, canceling the last of her dates.
She cried before she finished the first song. 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.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said. The crowd answered by chanting the riff from “Seven Nation Army.”
She said she had learned to live with the fragility and made it her reason to keep going. Then she sang for another two hours.
She saved “All By Myself” for the encore. She hit the high F, held it, then blew out a breath and turned to look back at the band. She fanned herself, laughing at her own relief.
She sang “My Heart Will Go On” and “The Power of Love,” then Catalani’s “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” in pink feathers while fake snow fell. Her disease attacks the larynx. She went for it anyway.
The last time France saw her sing, it lasted four minutes. At the Olympic opening ceremony in July 2024, Dion sang from the Eiffel Tower, one song, one night. Saturday she had to do it 25 times, then get up and do it again Wednesday.
Michelle Obama watched from the seats. Outside, fans wore sashes reading “Celine Dion 2026,” like beauty pageant winners.
“My daughter kept saying, ‘Mum, we can’t go all the way to Paris for Celine,'” said Isabelle Gagnon, 52, a teacher from Montreal. “Tonight my daughter was singing beside me, and I thought: you see? This is why we came.”
“In Montreal, you grow up knowing those songs whether you mean to or not,” said Antoine Beaulieu, 31, a graphic designer. “I used to pretend I was too cool for Celine. Tonight I knew every word, so clearly that was a lie.”
Camille Morel, 38, a pharmacist from Lyon, put her phone away. “I wanted to actually be there,” she said. “My voice is completely gone. I’m supposed to be working tomorrow , good luck to them.”
She closed with two Jean-Jacques Goldman standards and a last line to the room: “I love you, my loves. Take care of yourselves.”
It had taken her 2,379 days to get back. She has 25 more nights to go.
