Céline Dion: There Are No More Problems In the Sky

She was the surprise guest at the Olympic opening ceremony: Céline Dion, almost alone in the Eiffel Tower. You have to appreciate their comeback—even without being a fan.

One doesn’t need to be a Céline Dion fan to find her comeback performance at the Olympic Games admirable. One doesn’t even need to find the Olympic Games interesting or consider the Eiffel Tower more than a tourist trap.

Céline Dion is back, at least she was for three minutes when she sang “L’Hymne à l’amour,” the song by French chanson icon Édith Piaf. It was genuine and without playback—the unmistakable voice of Céline Dion. A bright spot in the dark, rainy Parisian midnight sky.

For days, there had been speculation about Dion’s alleged two-million-dollar fee for her appearance. Would the 56-year-old Canadian, who is revered in France, really perform? France’s President Emmanuel Macron had stated he would be pleased to have Dion as a star guest at the show, but it didn’t seem realistic. Isn’t Céline Dion ill? And has lost her voice, it was said. The headlines of recent years were too tragic.

And then, around midnight, at the end of the four-hour spectacular show on the Seine, a strong and courageous woman stood on the Eiffel Tower, someone you wouldn’t have thought could still manage a live performance.

She herself hadn’t believed it for a long time. Courage was the name of her last album in 2019, and courage is what you need when you have a rare neurological disorder: Stiff-Person Syndrome, which she described in a June TV interview with the BBC as feeling like someone is strangling you.

The severe cramps, which, among other things, affected her throat and thus the area of her body where her voice resides, took away the capital of her career. Due to a rare neurological condition, she had to cancel all performances on her Courage World Tour for 2023 and 2024 and gave only a few interviews.

For 17 years, she hid the illness from her fans, only speaking about the pain for the first time in her recently released Amazon Prime documentary, I Am Céline Dion. She only went public with it when she could neither sing nor perform. Presumably an extreme psychological burden. In her documentary, she says, among other things, that it’s not hard to give a show. “What’s hard is canceling a show.”

Before her illness, Dion was one of the most successful musicians of her generation, having sold more than 250 million albums worldwide—half as many as Madonna.

For many years, her career kept going up: She became famous in the USA with the title song for the Disney film Beauty and the Beast. In 1994, her first US number-one hit, “The Power of Love,” followed her version of the legendary Jennifer Rush ballad. She became known worldwide with the Titanic soundtrack hymn “My Heart Will Go On.”

Then she disappeared—only to secretly and hard work on returning to the spotlight over the past two years. In May, she explained to Vogue about dealing with her illness: “There were only two possibilities: Either I train like an athlete and work super hard, or I switch off, and it’s over, stay at home, listen to my songs, stand in front of the mirror and sing only for myself.”

Dion and her advisors still know how good marketing works, of course, and her comeback also shows this to the heights of the Eiffel Tower. What could have been more fitting than performing at the opening of the Olympic Games in front of real athletes? And who else but Céline Dion should have sung up there in front of all of France?

And then it was also her second time being allowed to sing at an opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games. Back then, at the Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996, she was half as old as she is today. With a medium-length bob and a rather demure white two-piece outfit, she sang “The Power of the Dream” at that time.

What was her dream? Vogue wanted to know in May. “My goal is to see the Eiffel Tower again!” Dion replied. Was her performance perhaps already planned then? It would have been a well-guarded French state secret in any case.

She wouldn’t have stood up there on the Eiffel Tower for fame, the million-dollar fee, or even more streaming views of her documentary. Céline Dion has probably earned enough money in her career. She said in an interview that she wanted to encourage others affected by the disease.

And so one can celebrate Céline Dion’s performance for what it was: a hymn to life. And the proof of a fighter that life may sometimes be difficult.