 The symphonic poems, Wagner assured his readers, were first and foremost music.Their importance for history ... lay in the fact that Liszt had discovered a way of creating his material from the potential essence of the other arts... Wagner's central observations are so accurate ... that we can only assume that there had been a number of discussions between [Liszt and Wagner] as to what exactly a "symphonic poem" really was.Such was the controversy over these works that two points were overlooked by the critics.