Celine Dion hits the high F in comeback concert in Paris

Celine Dion sang her way back to a concert stage Saturday night in Nanterre, France, closing her first full show in more than six years with the high F in “All By Myself” that fans have measured her voice against since 1996. The sold-out opening night of a punishing run was her first since stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease, attacked her throat muscles and forced her off the road.

Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. She was diagnosed in 2022. She canceled a world tour, then what was left of it, and went quiet. On Saturday she delivered 25 songs in 2 hours and 15 minutes at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris.

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 engagement meant to answer that question calls for 16 shows in five weeks, with 10 more booked for May 2027.

“Je vais bien,” Dion told the crowd. “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, touch and 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.

The voice has lost some of its top. Every big note is now a decision she makes in front of 30,000 people. 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.

Willo Perron’s set put her among gray megaliths. An 18-voice gospel choir came on in robes. Michelle Obama watched from the seats. Outside, fans wore sashes reading “Celine Dion 2026.”

“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.”

Then the encore, and the note: the last “anymore” a cappella, the note bent upward, the orchestra surging in beneath her. She fanned herself, laughing at her own relief.

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.