Maryam Maleki is a woman who is easy to underestimate - in terms of her skills, her level of experience and her assertiveness.

She enjoys the highest reputation among the highly talented pianists from all over the world, whom she has supported as President of the International Piano Forum Frankfurt for years in a full-time voluntary job to the point of self-exploitation: as an organizer who takes care of everything and who, like that of her competition for the International German Pianist Prize, which was launched in Frankfurt and now being held for the first time in the new Kronberg Casals Forum in the eleventh edition, is discreetly in the background.

In addition, with her sensitive attitude towards music, she creates ideal working conditions for the up-and-coming stars, enables them to perform and produce CDs.

Guido Holze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Maryam Maleki was born in Tehran in 1964 as the daughter of a diplomat and the youngest of five children in a Persian noble family on her mother's side.

The fact that she first attended a francophone school and that French is her main language can still be heard today when she speaks German from the accent.

As a girl, she experienced Iran in the late 1960s and 1970s until the revolution in its best free time, when there were "discos, nightclubs, miniskirts, elegance and parties," recalls Maryam Maleki.

But she rarely listened to pop and rock at home because her mother loved classical Western music dearly.

"It wasn't material things that counted, but which writers you read or knowledge of history and music," she says.

Soon she was taking lessons from an Armenian piano teacher.

In 1974 her father was sent to Beijing as an envoy, and there, at the end of Mao's rule, she saw herself "as if she were in a black-and-white film".

The Persian family was so conspicuous among the uniformed people that they were sometimes surrounded by a crowd in the car.

Since there was still no school for foreign diplomats' children, they grew up "like in a golden cage" in the fenced diplomatic quarter.

Maryam Maleki learned Chinese, but otherwise received "correspondence learning" from Paris: "Homework that I had to do self-taught".

"China has had a big influence on me," she says.

Only "the very peculiar music of the Peking Opera" never came close to her.

After five years, the family had to say goodbye to Beijing after the Shah left Persia as part of the Islamic Revolution.

When a friend of her father's was executed there without a trial, "everything was gone in Iran".

The family found themselves in Paris with some household effects from China, in a colorful world that, as a girl with Chinese braids, meant a "culture shock" for her: "I felt lost." She started regular school for the first time and had to adapt to "box through" a class.

That's when she learned to adapt and take on the best.

With short hair, she soon came to Germany to live with her brother, who was already living in Langenselbold.

Without language skills, she was downgraded to the tenth grade and learned German in the afternoons in Frankfurt.

Soon after graduating from high school, she met the love of her life, the Iranian banker Nader Maleki, now head of the Frankfurt Maleki Corporate Group, with whom she has been married for 35 years and has two grown children.

"Germany is a great country," says Maryam Maleki, not least with regard to freedom of expression and opportunities for personal development.

With the Piano Forum she wants to give something back: "And transform my love of music into something that benefits society."