I've been reading Alan Walker's Liszt:  The Weimar Years (bought cheap at
a used bookshop), with skepticism but a tremendous amount of enjoyment,
and my evaluation of this composer's music is going correspondingly up.
Whatever I may think of the purely biographical aspects- I don't know,
alas, with no offense to Mr.  Walker; this is my attitude towards any
biography- I think he makes an excellent case that the symphonic poems are
tremendous music, and extremely substantial.  Very worth reading for many
reasons if you can get ahold of it- I was already well past the stage years
ago where I hated Liszt's music, but I'm beginning to like a whole lot more
of it now than previously ;)

(While harmonic advances are not the same as substance, consider the
opening of Prometheus, or the whole-tone funeral march in Heroide Funebre,
as quoted by Walker in his biography; or the passage in Hunnenschlacht
with the amazing divisi string-orchestration.  Not, I agree, the same thing
as substance, though I personally think that too is present in a large
amount as well; but these works were groundbreaking in many ways.  And the
programs, which so put me off, are not written so literally as I'd feared
when one actually .reads. them...)

-Eric Schissel, not alas being very coherent.