[1] Maria Sidorova was born in Astrakhan, one of six children of Pyotr Sidorov, the executive director of the Volga Shipping company.

[2][3] After her father's death, ten-year-old Maria joined a local church choir to help her 27-year-old mother sustain a family.

[1] "[Maksakova] mastered a professional vocal range, demonstrating flawless precision in intonations and perfect sense of rhythm.

What was most attractive in the young singer's performances was her musical and verbal expressiveness, her total involvement with the lyrics", wrote Mikhail Lvov in his 1947 biography.

In the autumn the famous baritone Maximilian Maksakov joined the theatre as a new director (and soloist) and gave her several new roles, including those in Faust and Rigoletto.

In 1923 Maksakova came to Moscow, debuted (as Amneris, in Aida, as a last moment substitute for Nadezhda Obukhova, who fell ill)[2] at the Bolshoi Theatre, and was invited to join the star-studded troupe.

Her lyrical voice flew easily and freely, but what impressed us most was the integrity of her stage persona: for all her young age, she had the stateliness and commanding intonations of a princess who'd been accustomed to having an upper hand.

[1] In 1925 Maksakova moved to Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre where she sang parts in Orfeo ed Euridice, Khovanshchina (Marfa) and Red Petrograd by Gladkovsky and Prussak (Comrade Dasha), among many others.

She sang most of the leading female parts in the theater's classic repertoire, including Carmen, Marina Mniszech, Aksinya in The Quiet Don and Charlotte in Werther.

Maksakova, who was one of the first Soviet artists who in the mid-1930s received permission to perform abroad, and gave successful concerts in Turkey and Poland, later Sweden and (after the war) East Germany.

Despite insinuations concerning Joseph Stalin's 'special attention' towards the famous singer (the Soviet dictator, who treated Bolshoi as a 'court troupe', allegedly referred to Maksakova as "my Carmen") she spent the late 1930s waiting for her arrest.

Lyudmila Maksakova remembered: "Many years later a Moscow Art Theatre actor whom I met at the Morocco Film festival revealed to me the name of my father: Aleksander Volkov, the singer with the Bolshoi.

'Your father did not want to live in the USSR, he crossed the frontline and soon in the USA opened an opera and drama school,' this man told me.

Rumours had it, some people at the Bolshoi decided to settle some old scores this way, now that Stalin, her much-feared patron, was now dead, and the name of Vera Davydova, another famous Soviet soprano, has been mentioned in this context.

Yet she kept herself perfectly fit, with strict diet and regular gymnastics ... Our relations were pure and friendly, each respected and valued what the other was doing on stage," Davydova maintained.