Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tomás Luis de Victoria was the most famous Spanish composer of the Renaissance, born around 1548 in Ávila. He is ranked alongside Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as one of the principal composers of the late Renaissance. His surviving works are almost exclusively sacred polyphonic vocal music set to Latin texts.
Victoria went to Rome around 1565 after receiving a grant from Philip II, where he worked at the German College founded by St. Ignatius Loyola. He later held positions at the Pontifical Roman Seminary and S. Apollinare, before returning to Spain in 1587 to serve as chaplain at the Monasterio de las Descalzas de St. Clara in Madrid.
The Officium Defunctorum is a Requiem Mass composed by Victoria for the Dowager Empress María, daughter of Charles V, who died in 1603. It is considered his masterpiece and most famous work. Victoria had served the Empress for seventeen years as her chaplain at the Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid.
Victoria's music uses dissonance more freely than Palestrina's, including intervals such as ascending major sixths and diminished fourths that were prohibited under strict sixteenth-century counterpoint rules. Many commentators hear a mystical intensity and directness in his music that contrasts with what the source describes as the more rhythmically and harmonically placid character of Palestrina's work. Victoria also used dramatic word-painting, a technique typically found in madrigals rather than sacred music.
The Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae, published in 1585, is a collection of thirty-seven pieces tied to Holy Week celebrations in the Catholic liturgy. It includes the eighteen motets of the Tenebrae Responsories. Victoria published his first book of motets separately in 1572.
Victoria was born around 1548 as the seventh of nine children in Ávila. On his mother's side, the family descended from Jewish merchants and bankers from Segovia: his great-great-grandfather Jacob Galfón converted to Christianity in 1492 and took the name Pedro Suárez de la Concha. His paternal grandfather was a cloth merchant whose family showed signs of converso origins, though no direct evidence survives.