[...] Oh, with what wanton delight do I look back on our journey together; - you can have no idea of the pleasure it gives me to think of it! However peevish you were at the time & however much I felt the same, it is all completely outweighed by so many individual memories of the journey & by the whole of the atmosphere surrounding it. The visible signs of fortune’s favours which we encountered on every side are such as to make a man happy and proud. The ride home each evening to Teplitz filled me with a sense of poetry which even now continues to reverberate within me. What is there to compare with my comic relationship with the Reimans, the ridiculous jokes in the Black Horse, the journey to Gorkau, and the divine boredom of Carlsbad? Yet it is not these individual memories, but everything taken together, and, most of all, the sense of divine licentiousness, which takes on so attractive a form in my mind’s eye. And this after just 6 weeks in Bohemia - imagine what a couple of years in Italy would be like! Yes, my dearest Theodor, my plan is now firmly & irrevocably made. My Fairies must be performed in 3 or 4 good theatres in order to lay the ground for my Ban on Love, which I am at present in the process of completing: I am bound to make a name for myself with this opera, and acquire both fame & fortune; and if I am lucky enough to achieve these two things, I shall go to Italy, taking both them and you with me; this, I should add, will be in the spring of 1836. In Italy I shall then write an Italian opera, & - depending upon how things turn out - several more besides; when we are sun-tanned & strong again, we shall turn our gaze towards France, I’ll write a French opera in Paris, and God alone knows where I’ll end up then! But at least I know who I shall be - no longer a German philistine. This career of mine must be yours as well. The only thing that can destroy this plan is ill fortune, i.e. lack of good fortune; but I am now resolved to place my trust in good fortune.
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 9