[...] Everything depends on my thoroughly refreshing myself first, to gain the necessary youthful courage — after five years' pause in music-making — to set about my new gigantic task with zest and cheerfulness. I have to close a whole long chapter of my life, to begin a new, important one: for that I need fresh life-impressions! I want a certain saturation from without, that a goodly counter-pressure may make me turn my inside out with joy once more. So I must be quite unhindered, able to travel, enjoy Italy, perhaps even visit Paris again, and thereafter come to that agreeable rest which fails me at the present. The remainder will then arrive of itself. [...]
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to Wesendonck et al., trans. and indexed by William Ashton Ellis (Grant Richards, 1899), No. 2