Céline Dion at the Paris Olympics review – a dazzling and emotional return

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.”

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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”.

Dion, who perhaps more than any of her fellow 90s divas is attuned to the sweeping tides of feeling, naturally pulled every thread of longing, loss and resurgence from the lyrics, written by Piaf to a lover who died in a plane crash after it was first performed. Her rendition wisely favored her lower registers, though still projected from the Eiffel Tower’s stage as a bewitching, defense-melting spell.

Dion was the hard-earned crown jewel of a waterlogged ceremony that got off to a lively – and temporarily dry – start with Lady Gaga’s interpretation of Zizi Jeanmaire’s Mon truc en plumes (My Thing with Feathers) along the banks of the Seine. Channeling a 60s French dance party in striking black and pink, accentuated by cheeky choreography and, naturally, some voluminous feather pom-poms, the American singer paid direct homage to the French legend, who debuted the song in 1961. (Gaga paid prose tribute with context on social media , too – the pom-poms were from the archive of Le Lido, the costumes Dior and the saucy, beguiling attitude distinctly French. “Although I am not a French artist, I have always felt a very special connection with French people and singing French music,” she wrote. “I wanted nothing more than to create a performance that would warm the heart of France, celebrate French art and music, and on such a momentous occasion remind everyone of one of the most magical cities on earth – Paris.”)

Related: I Am: Céline Dion review – an earnest love letter from one of the last true divas

The nearly three-hour parade of athletes along the Seine was punctuated by several high-energy performances celebrating French history and culture, including French- Malian pop sensation Aya Nakamura, who strutted down the Pont des Arts, a bridge linking the Institut de France to the Louvre, for a gilded, if a little unsteady, performance of Pookie and Djadja on a water-slicked stage. Gojira, France’s greatest metal band , remixed the French revolutionary anthem Ah! Ça ira, along with opera singer Marina Viotti and the Paris symphony orchestra, for one of the most rousing, edgy performances of the evening, incorporating choristers dressed as beheaded Marie Antoinettes and the famous aria from Georges Bizet’s Carmen: L’amour est un oiseau rebelle. And Juliette Armanet sang a delicate version of John Lennon’s Imagine aboard a barge shaped like igneous rock, accompanied by a pianist whose pyrotechnics, as seen through a rain-splashed camera, made the whole thing look like a blurry ball of fire.

But no one held a candle to Dion, who seemed, in the final minute of her undaunted, beatific return, to nearly burst into tears at the momentously emotional occasion. She held it together; I did not – nor, I expect, did any viewer who knows what she’s overcome to sing again.