He attended the St. Elisabeth Gymnasium (secondary school) in the city before moving on to study at the university where for five years he was taught by the organist-composer Moritz Brosig.
In 1867 he produced a "Lexicon of Dutch Composers" which won a prize from the Amsterdam "Society for the promotion of Music", although in the end it was never published.
Another series of publications from the association was the 29-volume set entitled Publikation älterer praktischer und theoretischer Musikwerke, although it appears that this was never published in its entirety.
[3] There was also a succession of bibliographical works, which reflected Eitner's own enthusiasm for compositions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In addition, there was a ten-volume reference compendium entitled Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published between 1900 and 1904 in Leipzig, which set out the locations of both printed and manuscript works by early composers and musicologists, and which in the end was sufficiently valued as a research tool to be available in more than 200 major libraries in Europe.