Arab News | Celine Dion completes her first full concert in 6 years after overcoming rare illness

NANTERRE, France: 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. Some 30,000 people read it before they had finished screaming: Celine Dion did it.

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 that attacks the muscles, including those of the throat.

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 two nights later.

Dion gave the crowd three words: “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 school teacher from Nantes.

A disease that goes for the throat

Dion, 58, had not played a full concert since March 8, 2020. She was diagnosed in 2022 with stiff person syndrome, a rare, progressive neurological disease that seized the throat she had been singing with since she was 5. She canceled a world tour, then what was left of it, and went quiet. On Saturday night, 25 songs in 2 hours and 15 minutes at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, was the first night of the engagement meant to prove she can work again.

The sold-out run is punishing: 16 shows in five weeks, 10 more booked for May 2027, 26 nights in all before tens of thousands of people each time.

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 — and the world called it a resurrection. Saturday she had to do it 25 times, then get up and do it again Wednesday.

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.

‘I promised myself I wouldn’t cry’

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; it is not the instrument that sold 250 million albums. Every big note is now a decision she makes in front of 30,000 people.

She took most of them. She sang “My Heart Will Go On” and “The Power of Love,” then Catalani’s “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” — Maria Callas’ signature aria — 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, a pop Stonehenge. An 18-voice gospel choir came on in robes.

Michelle Obama watched from the seats. Outside, fans wore sashes reading “Celine Dion 2026,” like beauty pageant winners, and T-shirts from the LVMH house that shares her first name.

“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.