Singer, who hasn’t performed onstage since 2020 as a result of her health, brought down the house with a breathtaking take on an Edith Piaf classic
The casual sports fans of the world endured four hours of rambling, chaotic, rainy pomp and circumstance along the Seine on Friday evening for one reason: to possibly see Céline Dion return to the stage. The 56-year-old French-Canadian singer has not performed in over four years, owing to a rare, incurable neurological disorder called stiff person syndrome. Despite struggling with uncontrollable muscle spasms extreme enough to break ribs, Dion, a true-blue born performer, promised to one day return. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk. If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl,” she said in her recent documentary I Am: Céline Dion. “And I won’t stop. I won’t stop.”
On a soggy Friday night in Paris, at the tail end of the Olympic opening ceremonies, Dion did more than just return – she triumphed. Bedecked in silver sparkles, accompanied by a rain-soaked piano on the steps of the Eiffel Tower, she not only sang Edith Piaf’s Hymne a l’amour – which, truly, would have been more than enough – but performed it with the gusto of someone who, by her own admission, longs to resume touring more than her fans. If you have seen the documentary, then you know it is nearly impossible to fathom the amount of medicine and therapy, on top of bottomless grit and determination, required for Dion to retake the stage, let alone be the capstone performance at Paris’s Olympics, let alone do it well, with palpable, distinctive vocal power and without seeming to miss a note. She is, as pop singer Kelly Clarkson put it on the American NBC broadcast, a “vocal athlete”.
