On new year's Day, 1878, Nietzsche gifted his autographed copy of the score of Tristan to Köselitz and of Meistersinger to Köselitz's friend and his own sometime student, Paul Widemann. If he had thought to clear the decks of Wagneriana, however, he failed since the next day he received from Wagner a copy of the completed libretto of his final opera, Parsifal. To von Seydlitz Nietzsche wrote,

One might think of El Greco's boneless, fleshless, ghostly, already-almost-ascended-to-heaven saints and martyrs to get the point about Liszt and the Counter-Reformation. Wagner had anticipated this reaction by signing the copy ‘for his dear friend, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Church Councillor’, a self-deprecating joke that Nietzsche stubbornly refused to get. ‘Incredible’, he comments retrospectively in Ecce Homo, ‘Wagner had become pious’.

A few days later, Human, All-Too-Human was finally completed and sent off to Schmeitzner. It was planned to appear in May, timed to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire, Nietzsche's temporary hero, to whom the first edition of the work was dedicated. He was extremely nervous about the work's reception.